


They Come In Pairs

by phaetonschariot



Series: Mutual Service [7]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 01:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phaetonschariot/pseuds/phaetonschariot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sunny day brings questions that desperately need answers as the team races to catch a serial killer before he strikes again... or unleashes the very essence of death upon Cardiff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Friday morning. For most of the world it was TGIF, but Gwen had learned quickly that Torchwood was even worse than the police force for keeping normal hours. She'd been called away from a date with Rhys even before her scheduled first day, after all. At least it was one of Cardiff's rare sunny autumn days, she noted, climbing out of her car - not that that would mean much if they stayed in the Hub all day. She'd have to try and get everyone out for lunch, she decided. Surely keeping the team human covered making sure they saw the sun once in a while. She wasn't sure how Jack managed, living in the Hub like he did. No wonder he was so distanced from reality.

Not far ahead of her she spotted Toshiko and Ianto, and sped her pace to catch up. It looked like they'd come in together, and _that_ was interesting, wasn't it? As was the way Toshiko was hanging off his arm, and the fact that they both had damp hair, and Ianto... wasn't wearing a suit. She wasn't sure she'd _seen_ him out of a suit before, excepting medical scrubs, and she had to admit that the snug long sleeved tee and even snugger jeans were a good look for him. It also reminded her how young he was.

"Morning!" she greeted them brightly, deciding not to comment on their appearance. As long as they were happy. Though it might be an idea to invite them for dinner sometime if this wasn't just a once-off. Get them a bit more connected to the world outside Torchwood. Ianto especially - things had to be hard for him still. "Pity to spend a day like this inside, isn't it?"

"It's just doing it to spite me," Ianto complained, making her take another look at his - borrowed - sunglasses and rumpled demeanour. Hangover, she decided, and swung her purse around so she could rummage out some paracetamol. 

"Here. Good cup of coffee and you'll be right."

"Thanks." He had to juggle his things for a moment to get his keys in the right hand - and that was an awful lot of keys; he must have been able to open most of the Hub with those - as they came down onto the path to their little tourist office. There was a brown paper wrapped parcel waiting for them, and Tosh bent to lift it up as Ianto let them in, collecting the more traditional envelopes that had been pushed through the mail slot. "Who's that for?" he asked her, rifling speedily through the envelopes and separating out three to leave on the counter - presumably actually addressed to the tourist office.

"Jack. I think there's sample containers in it."

Ianto shrugged tiredly, slapping the button to open the secret door. Gwen still felt a little thrill as the wall moved away, the smaller cousin of the way she'd felt the first time Toshiko had let her in this way, when she hadn't even known what Torchwood was or what she'd find below.

"Good morning, sunshines!" Jack bellowed as they entered, the door alarms blaring loudly. Ianto winced at the noise.

"Don't talk to me yet." He pushed the mail into Jack's hand, heading to the kitchenette, and Jack shot her a conspiratorial grin when he saw she'd noticed.

"Remind me to ask Ianto what it would take to get him to wear those jeans for _me_ ," he told her, not bothering to lower his voice so that the sound carried across the open space.

"Dinner at the very least!" he called back, and all three of them laughed.

*

Ianto managed to swallow down an entire glass of water as the coffee machine worked its magic; now that they were out of the sun the ache in his brain was receding, though the electrical hum of the computers was more annoying than usual. At least Tosh's couch had been fairly comfortable, soft and squashy, though admittedly he'd been at that stage of tipsy where he probably would have found the carpet soothing.

Since Owen hadn't arrived and he wasn't even in his suit yet, he didn't bother pouring coffee for everyone. At least Jack took it black, so he filled both their mugs, carrying them out and passing Jack's to him on his way across the Hub. "Coffee's up," he announced, as though the smell and presence of his drink weren't clue enough.

It was almost funny how Gwen and Tosh both turned to make a beeline for the kitchen. He was about to continue to his quarters when Jack's hand on his arm made him pause. "Have fun before the hangover hit?" he asked, lips quirking slightly.

"You don't have to check up on me." There was a brief silence as he considered how petulant that might sound, and then he inclined his head in apology and agreement. "We came third. The sports round was a bust, there was only one on rugby."

"Pity they don't have an alien tech section." The lip-quirk became a grin that disappeared below the rim of Jack's mug, his hand dropping as he turned towards his office. Work to do.

By his count, it would take him six minutes to get to his room, change and wash his face. The cool water would help, and he'd probably still be back before Owen got in.

*

When he got back to the upper Hub he was met by one of Jack's more _blinding_ grins, the kind that left him slightly dazzled and sort of wishing he hadn't handed Tosh her sunglasses back. "Hey Ianto! Come see my package!"

The innuendo was too obvious not to be intentional. "I'm sure that's entirely inappropriate," he said in his best 'sir is pleased to be very amusing' voice, prim and verging the tiniest bit on shocked. Honestly he didn't even remember, aside from a throwaway job summary uttered in desperation in a nearly-empty warehouse, where the butler persona had come from, only that Jack had seemed to like the suits and somehow over those first weeks when he'd worked here he'd seemed to... fall into it. And that it had been fun. He remembered that. Even now when they'd done all manner of explicit things to one another there was a certain thrill in the roleplay and the back-and-forth of the flirt. He clasped his hands behind his back now to complete the image, but did walk over, as Jack indeed was carefully removing the paper from the parcel Tosh had brought in. It was wrapped around a plain box, and the contents shifted audibly as Jack turned it. It _did_ sound rather like containers. 

Slicing open the tape with a pocket knife, Jack flipped the top flaps open and reached in to pull out... glass tupperware? "We seem to have been sent someone's leftovers," he observed, tilting his head to try for a better angle to peer through the glass. Whatever it was was packed tightly enough that it wasn't entirely clear _what_ it was. He looked back up at Jack questioningly. "Shepherd's pie for dinner, then?"

"Think I'm taking you out, actually. At the very least." He winked, reaching back into the box to pull out two more containers. "Archie said he was sending these four months ago. Nothing important, Owen just wanted a look for the record."

Ianto paused in reaching for one for a closer look, partly idly curious and partly just enjoying the banter. He hadn't switched over to work mode yet, really, and would have been perfectly happy with a nice long lie in. "That's Tosh, you and Rhiannon. Three days in a row, I'm going to forget what this place looks like."

"If you're going to stay here you need to get out sometimes. Both of us," he amended quickly.

"I like it here. The commute's fantastic." He gave Jack a somewhat placid look and was met with a grin at the quip. Jack, he suspected, might think that a lot of the reason had to do with him, and while he was part of it, it was more just that the Hub made Ianto feel safe. He didn't know how to explain it, not really, but it was sort of as though they were nestled away secure in their own little world. Maybe it was just that the base was so different from Torchwood Tower, or that not as many truly awful things had happened here. Lisa's death, yes, but he was beginning to think maybe he really couldn't have ever saved her, even if he had gotten hold of the cybernetics expert he'd been tracking down.

It occurred to him, on some level, that Jack might know the right thing to say to make him stop wondering. Hard to say, really. After all, all the information he'd found already said there was no way to reverse it, and all Jack could do was either repeat that in a self-assured manner... or tell him the information was wrong and he'd just failed. It was probably for the best that he couldn't open that particular can of worms. Not without admitting why he'd been so desperate for a job.

He ignored the faintly disquieting twist in his gut at that, hearing the phone start to ring and stacking the containers into a neat pile as Jack turned away and began bounding up the steps to his office. There really was no other way to describe the action, and he hid a small smile, absently dismantling the box ready for the rubbish.

His morning routine was barely started when Jack came back out of his office, looking rather more serious than when he'd gone in. "Owen in yet?" His voice echoed through the space of the Hub, and Ianto mused that it really couldn't have been a coincidence that the acoustics were so good in that spot, the very entrance to Jack's domain.

"I can see him on CCTV," Toshiko replied. "Just went into the tourist office."

"Great. Ianto, is the SUV equipped?"

"All the basic tools, sir," he confirmed. "Anything else you want me to get out?"

"Nah, should be fine." Jack ducked back into his office long enough to grab his coat before starting down the stairs; smoothly, Ianto took it from him to help him into it as the entrance alarms went off, the cog door rolling back to allow their errant medic entrance. "Owen! We've got a crime scene. You, Gwen, Ianto, with me."

That was new. He shared a quick glance with Tosh before falling in behind Jack to follow him to the garage. Well, at least with a crime scene he was getting low-risk field experience, he supposed. He just hoped his spare sunglasses were still in the glovebox.

*

The bedroom stank of blood and piss, and Owen glanced across at Jones. He didn't know why Jack had brought him, and he definitely didn't want to have to deal if he had some kind of post-traumatic breakdown. 

Then he saw the scene, and stopped thinking about Ianto's mental state. "Woah."

No wonder the smell was so bad. There was a lot of blood, splattered across rucked up blankets and staining sheets and nightclothes. Slashes to the throat - straight lines, clean cuts, he noted, and facial expressions indicated that death had been quick. The man still had his eyes closed - the killer probably went for him first, eliminate the biggest threat.

Hardly the most worrying thing though. A large framed photo had been knocked off the wall over their bed, creating a blank space that the killer had used to leave a message. In its victims' blood.

TORCHWOOD.

"Looks like someone's trying to get your attention," commented the policewoman who'd led them in.

Jack nodded tersely. "They've got it." He glanced around the room, quickly, darting from one thing to the next though he seemed to absorb every detail. Then again, Owen reckoned they all thought Jack had a lot more godlike powers than he really did. Half of what he did was showmanism, smoke and mirrors. Their gaze met for a moment and Owen could practically feel their boss' unease. Didn't blame him either. There was nothing good that could come of this shit. Finally Jack turned back to the copper. "Have you got anything else?"

"We found a few of the killer's hairs from the first murder," she replied. "The results should be in soon." He took note of that - no doubt they'd take their own conclusions from it, but they didn't know what they might be looking at. 

"Good, we'll need that. Now, if you could just clear the room? Some of this  
equipment is strictly need to know."

That sorted, Owen turned back to where Gwen was unpacking one of the scanners, just in time to see Ianto start. He'd been staring at the bodies with that weird blank look on his face that he got when he was wandering round the Hub fetching things, and Owen shook his head a little. You didn't get someone out of Canary Wharf, let them kill themselves, then just bring them back to life and put them to work.

"Actually, Detective, do you think you could show me the living area? If I can get an idea of what these people were like I might be able to link them to one of our previous case files."

There was a pregnant pause, then she sighed. "Fine. Come on."

Owen waited til they were out of the room before shrugging, grabbing the latex gloves that Gwen held up for him to start pulling them on. "Still, at least we've got a head start. If it's someone we've pissed off, that narrows it down to, oh, four or five million."

"And that's just the humans," Jack agreed. He moved to the other side of the bed and started looking through the contents of one of the nightstands, either looking for evidence or just out of curiosity. It was hard to tell sometimes.

Gloves on, Owen looked back at the bodies and sighed. He liked it better when they were aliens.

*

They'd only had about ten minutes in the bedroom before Detective Swanson stuck her head back through the door. "DNA results on the hair are in if you want to see them." She sounded more cheerful than when she'd left, and Jack held back a grin - he was pretty sure she'd been about to give him a bollicksing before Ianto had spoken up, and apparently that good old Welsh charm had done its work well.

"Think we're about done here anyway," Owen said, tugging his gloves off with a grimace. He reached out to grab the file as Ianto slipped in the doorway carrying a cardboard carton, and Jack gave him a mildly curious look before moving to look over Owen's shoulder. DNA first, personal effects later.

"Initial findings say, Caucasian male, early 40s, smoker, drinks tequila," Swanson recited as Owen read. "Doesn't match any DNA profiles. Only thing of interest is a compound we've never seen before. Recognize it?"

Jack saw the code at the same time as Owen. The doctor groaned, looking up. "Oh, we're in trouble. Compound B67."

"Retcon," Jack agreed grimly. He did a quick check of the room - Gwen was packing up the last of their equipment, while Ianto had shifted the carton to rest on one hip, PDA out in the other hand. "I think we're done here. We need to get this back to the Hub."

Confident that he'd be followed, he strode past Swanson and out of the house. The rest of this could be dealt with by the police. Too many trivial details that had nothing to do with them - this was why he left clean ups to people like Toshiko and Ianto. He was much better at the big picture. Speaking of Ianto - he spared a glance for him as they walked, noticing that they'd somehow fallen into a pretty decent line formation. Suitably dramatic exit, he thought. "Ianto, did you run those names?"

"Yep. No sign of any of the three victims in our databases and no apparent link between them. Sara Briscoe did run what looks like a debate society though, so I thought, if we're looking for a connection... there's a lot of papers and some photos in here."

"Nice work. Get Gwen to help you when we're back at the Hub." He yanked the driver's door open and swung into the seat, coat flying out behind him so that he had to pull it in to keep it from being slammed in the door. 

"Seatbelt," Ianto reminded him in a low voice from the passenger side, and Jack rolled his eyes, but obeyed. Not like they were going to get ticketed.

In the backseat, Gwen gave an over-exaggerated sigh. "More bloody police-work! Thought you were going to get me away from all that."

He laughed as he gunned the engine and backed out of their impromptu parking space. "Aliens have paperwork too."

"Pity we can't just bring them back and ask them, really."

Owen snorted. "Yeah, coz that worked so well _last_ time."

A quick check confirmed that Ianto's expression was still light and amused, and Jack relaxed fractionally. "I thought so," he agreed. "Not a chance though. The resurrection days are over."

"I wouldn't know about that." Ianto braced himself against the dashboard as they came up to a red light, pausing to glare at Jack for his hasty braking. "That's the thing about gloves, after all. They come in pairs."

His tone of voice was clearly teasing, but Jack couldn't help but feel a faint chill at his words. Something niggled at the back of his mind, some story he'd heard once maybe, something said by a little girl, and as the others continued to joke and banter he fell silent. The team had no reason to think the other glove was anywhere near Cardiff, though, and that was the way he intended to keep it. Ianto was a lucky fluke - those things gave people too much power and that was never a good thing. Best to stick to police-work, no matter how tedious it was.

*

There was something about Ianto that sometimes made Gwen feel about thirteen years old - not in the giddy, giggly way that Jack could pull out of her, but the awkwardness that seemed to be a neverending torment of the teenage years. Even knowing he was hungover (and once she knew to look, she could see the drawn look of someone suffering a headache, though it did seem to be fading), she felt too casual in her mostly-practical clothing, a little bit inept every time he had to remind her of some protocol, and never entirely sure what to say to him. There often seemed to be too many touchy subjects for idle conversation, something that was not entirely restricted to Ianto, but which she _felt_ more strongly with him.

Putting aside another page of notes that had turned out to be fruitless, she flicked her gaze up to glance at him across the conference room table. They had already gathered there to fill Tosh in and discuss the implications of their findings, and while Jack had been hardly reassuring when she'd remembered her own brush with retcon, she had at least had time to justify it to herself. It had only been one dose, after all. "So," she said, trying a smile on. "Is this the sort of thing you did in London?"

"Research and Development. Mostly collating findings and cross-referencing similarities between projects." He held up a photo, twisting it to see it from another angle before tossing it aside. "A lot of the staff didn't even know about aliens. No point if you just work in HR."

The idea of Torchwood, their Torchwood, with an HR department was sort of laughable. They hardly seemed capable of anything close to that much organisation - but they were also a team of five, not the eight hundred or so that she'd learned London was able to boast. She wasn't even sure what sort of work they'd _do_ with eight hundred people, and if almost all of them were dead now, it was likely not many other people knew either. "Must have been quite a change, coming here."

A brief flicker of something crossed his face, and she wondered if this was another of those things she shouldn't talk about. But it had been a few months now, and surely it would do him some good to talk, if he wanted to. It wasn't as though they offered much opportunity for it. "It's certainly more relaxed," he replied after a moment, lips quirked into something of a teasing smile. "We had remarkably fewer prehistoric animals in London, too. Which is a point in..."

He trailed off, reaching for a photo that had just been partially uncovered, and Gwen left a finger holding her place as she gazed at him curiously. He didn't continue though, instead pushing his chair back suddenly and rising to walk out of the room, Gwen hastening to follow.

"Jack!"

Jack was leaning against Toshiko's desk, and he looked up at the sound of Ianto's voice. "Found something?"

"Our connection. Notice something familiar about this photo?" He moved down the stairs towards the main floor until he was low enough for Jack to reach up to take it. He only studied the picture for a moment before Gwen saw his eyes widen slightly and he whipped his head up to stare at Ianto.

"That's Suzie."

"Exactly."

Jack frowned at the picture for a moment longer, then shoved it back towards Ianto. "Got to go out. No one do anything until I get back."

*

This was a bad idea, Jack thought as he steered the SUV through the Cardiff streets, afternoon sun angling down through the windshield and necessitating both sunglasses and the lowering of the visor. Restless and antsy, he reached to turn the stereo on, grimacing a little when one of Ianto's blippy electro pop dance funk CDs started, and flicked it off again.

Awful idea, he amended, swerving into a parking space and getting out of the car, pushing his way inside past bouncers and other patrons. The girl was waiting for him, and one day he'd figure out how she always knew. Her longevity, whatever variety it may have been, had brought wisdom - his had mostly brought sex and misjudgements.

Sitting, he tried to contain his impatience as she laid out cards, racing to interpret them before her even though he knew it was useless. "They hid it in a church?" he guessed, and she shook her head.

"No. When the people found out what it could do, they built the church on top of it."

That was all he needed. He knew where the church was - once you'd been in Cardiff as long as he had, you found you picked up a lot of the city's secrets, and contrary to what the team might have thought, a hell of a lot of them he let lie. He'd gotten halfway across the room before her voice, soft as always but somehow strong enough to carry, caught him. "If I told you not to use it, would you listen?"

He wanted to say yes, badly. Another day he probably would have, except that another day he wouldn't have come this far. He remembered the Briscoe's bedroom, the amount of blood they'd had to lose to create the macabre message on the wall and how much more had been spilled on the sheets. Somehow, this was connected to them. To Suzie. And that meant it was his responsibility.

"Shouldn't you already know the answer to that?" he tossed back over his shoulder - bad psychic joke, 'you've reached the psychic hotline, wrong number', har har - and left.

*

"What the hell, Jack?"

The lift wasn't even halfway down when Owen leapt to his feet, startling Toshiko. True to Jack's demand (for she had no illusions that it was anything but - he was a good man, but patience was not always something that came easily) they had all been sitting, waiting, doing nothing for most of the time that he had been gone. Every so often one of them would speak, but the bursts of conversation were short and stilted.

Now they all moved towards him: Owen and Gwen just behind him, with Ianto moving slower and Toshiko herself bringing up the rear. They were like ducklings, she mused wryly, or perhaps puppies who'd just realised that their master was on the front doorstep.

When the paving stone was close enough to the ground Jack jumped off it, no tbothering to wait. He was carrying a heavy-looking box, and as he shook off their questions and moved past them they turned as one to follow him to his office. 

She had a strange feeling about this, and not necessarily a good one, either.

Jack had his back to them as he set the box down on his desk and opened it, pausing before reaching in to pull out the object inside almost... reverently. She could see the glint of metal reflected in the glass walls and something began to twist in the bottom of her stomach.

Then he turned around and there, an end held in each hand, was the glove. No-- not the same one. The first one had been for the right hand, this was for the left. "Oh my god," she breathed. 

"No way." That was Ianto, and she shifted closer to him in solidarity, barely glancing at him before staring back at Jack. Her mouth was open slightly, almost an o, which felt silly when she realised. "Jack--"

"Jack, you can't!" Gwen's objection was mirrored by Owen, which left the four of them, for once, standing in agreement, Jack facing them. He looked around at them, gaze lingering on Ianto a moment longer than the others, and Tosh shifted uncomfortably. The moment was much tenser than she liked, though at least it was more tension at the _situation_ rather than each other. Which, considering the make up of the team, was almost an improvement on most days.

"Look, I don't like it either, but you saw that picture. We have a killer with retcon in his blood and victims who ran a debate society that Suzie visited. Unless someone can think of another way?"

Toshiko knew that there were no online records of the group - she'd already run all the searches she could think of, but it seemed that Sara had never bothered with a website. There were still businesses that were completely offline, she knew, but it was a little off-putting. Hard to remember if she'd felt like that when she worked in the Ministry of Defense. It might have just been a result of how entrenched in technology they were here. It certainly meant, though, that she had no way of coming up with a membership roster, and as she tried to meet Ianto's eye and instead found Gwen's, it was obvious that they hadn't found any real list in the hard copy, either.

But after Suzie, who had never been her best friend but who she'd _liked_ for most of the time they'd worked together, and after everything that had happened to Ianto, she couldn't help the almost visceral reaction she had to the thing. There was just something wrong about it. "Maybe we should think about this," she tried, disliking how there seemed to be a note of pleading in her voice but unable to change it. 

The important thing was that Jack paused, though instead of her he was studying Ianto, gauging his expression or emotional state or something that only Jack was ever aware of. Finally he jerked a nod. "Take two hours," he said, making it nothing less than an order. "Get something to eat. We'll discuss our options when we get back."

He set the glove down on his desk with a clank, jointed fingers pointing perversely upwards, and walked out of the room. Ianto made to follow, and Tosh halted him with a hand on the arm. "Are you alright?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah." His smile was tight and didn't quite reach his eyes, but a moment later he softened a little, enough for her to recognise that he was at least making an effort. "Thanks."

"We will sort this out." She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt, and tried to remind herself that their track record on overcoming dangerous odds was a good one. This only _felt_ bad. Giving him a more genuine smile than he'd been able to manage, she leaned up to press a kiss to his cheek before letting him go. No doubt he and Jack had a lot to talk about.

*

Ianto caught up to Jack in the kitchenette, staring blankly at the contents of one of the cupboards. As he recalled, it was the one containing canned food, a toaster and bread and butter plates, which led him to believe that Jack was not actually particularly interested in what he was looking at. "They put the food inside the can and seal it," he told him seriously. "It makes it last longer."

"Funny." Caught out, he swung the door closed and turned, one hip against the edge of the counter in a manner that drew the eye to the angle of his long legs. Normally he was a man of big gestures, waving his hands wildly when he spoke and using his whole body to smile, but now the expression on his face was... muted, somehow.

"I like to think so," Ianto agreed. Behind him, he could hear the others talking amongst themselves, more Owen and Gwen than Tosh, about the glove and Jack and whether they should go get an early dinner somewhere. He hoped they did; this was really a conversation he wanted to have alone, even not knowing where it was going to go. Or probably because of that. It could as easily be a heart to heart as a shouting match, and neither were something he particularly wanted an audience for. Sighing, he reached out to hook a finger into Jack's belt - not pulling him closer, just letting it rest there in a silent communication of solidarity even through disagreement. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Not really. I don't know if we have much choice, though." His gaze moved to over Ianto's shoulder, evidently holding the same opinion as he did on witnesses to the discussion. The sounds were definitely moving towards a packing up sort of vibe, though, and Ianto expected that the cog door would be rolling open shortly. "At least we know destroying the glove will break the connection. I don't want her hanging around here any longer than necessary."

There was probably something funny about that logic, but Ianto was damned if he could put a finger on exactly what. "Not to make this all about me, but we also don't know if opening another connection will cause any... complications."

Jack drew in a breath to reply, then stopped, evidently thinking about the implications of that point. It was almost amusing that Ianto could practically see his brain working, eyes unfocused slightly as whatever train of thought he was having processed, corner of his mouth turned down slightly in a faint frown. "Unlikely," he said slowly, "but you're right, I don't want to take that risk. Not over Suzie. Which means... either we hope someone comes up with a better plan, or we let Gwen try." Now it was his turn to sigh, reaching up to run a hand through his hair tiredly, leaving it a little ruffled and mussed and Ianto itching slightly to fix it. "Why do we never get stuck between two really fantastic options?"

"Actually, we do that pretty much every night we end up in bed together." Ianto smirked, remembering the last time Jack had brought him nearly to the edge and then stopped to ask _what he wanted_. Expecting anything in that situation more specific than 'anything, oh god, just let me come' was really far too optimistic, in his opinion.

Jack laughed, though, so he decided the comment was a success. "Oh yeah. Maybe we should explore that later, just to even the balance a bit."

From the warmth of his skin, Ianto was fairly sure he was flushing. He'd never met someone so entirely unashamed of their sexuality before - in some ways, that was the biggest clue that Jack was more than he seemed. Far from rebelling against social norms or overcompensating for some self-perceived lack, he really just genuinely enjoyed sex and didn't have time for anyone else's judgements. Which, he had to admit, led to some great benefits for him. It was a point of view that had a lot to recommend it, really. "Weren't you going to buy me dinner first?" he asked, raising an eyebrow slightly in an attempt to feel like he at least had some control over the conversation. "You did tell us all to get something to eat."

"So I did. And you said something about jeans." Somehow he stretches out the last word, making it seem so much more salacious than anyone ought to be able to. "Then again all the decent restaurants seem to have something against casual wear. Maybe it would be better to explore the world of tight-fitting denim later."

"If it would help keep us from getting banned for lewd behaviour," Ianto replied drily, though there was a smile threatening his poker face. He let his hand fall free of Jack's belt and patted him lightly on the chest. "I'll go clean up a bit, shall I?" No doubt his suit would be good enough for any restaurant Jack could get them into on short notice, but he could at least change his shirt and tie.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This takes place after part one, during the two hours given to the team to have dinner and think things over, and is largely irrelevant to the plot. Note that it has a higher rating than the rest of the fic, Mature, but can be skipped straight past.

With the days shortening into winter, it was dark when Jack and Ianto left the restaurant. The sky was cloudless for once, and Jack tilted his head back to look at the stars - so few in the city, even if Cardiff wasn't nearly so big as London or New York - eyes drawn immediately and habitually to identifying those he'd visited. There was a time, he remembered, where he would have given anything to be back out there instead of grounded on one backwards little planet, full of incomprehensible social mores and a curious mass denial of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the existence of intelligent life beyond their world. Sometimes, part of him was still a little bit surprised that he hadn't leapt at the chance to leave with the Doctor.

Seemed it was difficult to spend a century in one place without getting just a bit attached, though, and he glanced sideways at Ianto with a smile. Sometimes getting attached was just fine. He felt a little loose-limbed and a lot relaxed, something he felt justified in blaming on the wine though he hadn't had more than two glasses of it, and it was too hard not to give into the temptation to suddenly grab hold of Ianto and spin him into a twirling dance across the Plass until the Welshman was laughing - possibly at him, rather than with him, but he was alright with that. He slowed to a halt, drawing Ianto in closer until they were standing chest-to-back, Jack's chin resting on his shoulder. "Cardiff needs more nights like this," he murmured. "You've got too many clouds."

"What's this 'you'?" Ianto asked, leaning back a little so that Jack could feel the weight of him in his arms. "You've lived here longer than anyone else. Longer than anywhere else."

"It wasn't supposed to be more than a stopover," he admitted easily - and that was strange, too, after holding himself apart from his colleagues for so long. There was a kind of sense in it, though, as he tried to pretend that they were frozen in time; without the passing of time you could hardly have cause and affect, nor could you have consequences, and even less could you have the weight of making decisions and taking responsibility for people too naive to know better. More than half of the self-imposed two hour countdown had gone now, trickled away in conversation and food and the world outside where normal people had meals in good restaurants with polished and professional waitstaff watching over them. It felt good to be the one watched over, for once.

Ianto huffed a laugh, and if Jack looked closely he could see the faintest tendrils of air rushing from his lips into the cooling night. "Wales will do that to you." He turned a little, awkwardly with Jack's arms wrapped around him, but he was reluctant to let go even to allow him to rearrange himself. "We should go inside."

There was a promise in his voice, one that wound into Jack's body right down to the bone and coaxed his limbs to loosen so that Ianto could slip out. He was quick enough at least to catch his wrist before he escaped completely, and it was almost like holding hands as they walked towards the invisible lift by the water tower.

*

Ianto pressed him down into the mattress, mouth trailing over his stomach, light enough to make his nerve endings tingle and strain for feeling. It made him too aware of the slide of his shirt, still half on, and the tickling of stray strands of Ianto's hair, but he arched up into it anyway. He had a long history of always wanting more. Why stop now?

He groaned when that mouth slid down over his cock, one hand going to curl around Ianto's arm as the other spread itself wide open and flat on the sheets. The stretch of muscles felt good in an entirely different way, more like the small satisfaction of the first decent full-body stretch when you got up in the morning, and it paled in comparison to the things Ianto was doing with his tongue - not fluent in this language yet, phrases formed in touches and the slide of skin on skin, but knowledgeable enough to hold a perfectly good conversation that was all the more charming for the odd fumbles - but Jack felt hyper-aware, mind open to everything within reach. The blankets were crumpled and bunched around his feet, and he pushed at them, needing the air cool against his flushed skin wherever the trousers Ianto still wore weren't brushing against the insides of his legs.

His eyes fell on the clock then, one of those digital alarm clocks people had to pull them out of bed first thing, and the lurid LEDs penetrated the light fog over his mind to remind him of the deadline hanging over them; half an hour, now, and he turned away, pulled Ianto up to kiss him, tasting himself on his lips. His back was warm and solid as his hands slid down it, passing over scars that he didn't ask about because the first time he'd noticed them Ianto had known it and the look in his eyes had so clearly wanted him not to. It was easy to get rid of that last layer and then there was nothing between them and they could wrap around each other, moving in a rhythm that felt like the ocean. That was something they had in common, growing up on a coast, and Jack fancied it was something that stayed with you.

He came first for once and Ianto laughed into the curve of his neck, then sucked in a breath when Jack wrapped his hand around him, stroking him off with his own come as lubricant. He murmured something incoherent as he tipped over the edge, eyes squeezed shut and his whole body tensed and still, like a bowstring drawn tight in the moment before release.

None of them probably would have guessed it, but the moments right after were some of Jack's favourite. They breathed together as they came down, neither of them making a sound until the idle stroking movement of Jack's hand on Ianto's stomach made him let out a soft, "mmmm..." of lazy pleasure, a little like he was purring. (God, Jack missed New Earth sometimes. There was nothing quite like a cat person - much like there was nothing quite like wings or tentacles or thick fur coats or the slide of aquatic mammals.) "We're going to get all sticky," he mumbled against Jack's skin, finally.

"We already are," he pointed out. The ambience had been cracked, though, and he shifted a little so that they were lying next to each other, limbs overlapping slightly rather than being completely entangled. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

He half-expected Ianto to deliberately misunderstand him, but instead he just gazed at him from under lidded eyes and mussed hair, expression troubled and solemn. "No," he said. "But that's not the point, is it? You'd have to be crazy to want to do half of what we have to."

Jack sighed, staring up at the ceiling for several seconds as he let his thoughts mull around in his head. It was true, really, but not something they often acknowledged out loud, any of them. Easier to just get caught up in the adrenalin and thrill of it all, which unfortunately didn't entirely hold up when they didn't have the excuse of the heat of the moment to relieve their doubts about the calls they made.

Evidently not wanting him to sink into his own thoughts, Ianto flicked at a nipple, making Jack yelp and glare at him and giving only a smug smile in return. "Come on. Shower and clothes and I'll get us a coffee."

They tumbled out of bed all tired limbs and mess, and Jack comforted himself with the thought of water pressure and heat. Still, it wasn't enough to get things completely off his mind; "This is going to end in disaster, I know it," he groaned.

Ianto just glanced back at him, pushing the en suite door open and leaning into the shower to turn it on. "We'll like you afterwards anyway," he said mildly. "Except Owen, but that's more of a blessing than not."

Jack snorted and cuffed him lightly round the shoulder, but his smile lingered as they waited for the steam to fill the air.


	3. Chapter 3

The glove was not as heavy in her hands as Gwen had expected, and the disconnect was strange, like when you walked up a flight of stairs with an idea in your head that there was one more step than there really was and put your foot down on thin air. She had never handled the first one either - Jack had locked it away himself on that first night, while she'd stood in his office half in shock watching Toshiko and Owen surrender their own guilty pleasures, and he'd insisted on being the only one to use it when he'd brought Ianto back, too. It couldn't have been substantially heavier than this one, though. 

"Remember," Jack told her, huge hand heavy on her shoulder where it rested as though to impart strength, "at most, we've got two minutes, but no one's expecting that on your first try. I'll question her as quickly as I can."

She nodded mutely, staring at the burnished metal. It was of no use like this, ornamental and decorative like it was an unassuming relic of the age of knighthood, but it still creeped her out, a little. Slowly she moved her hand, sliding it inside, and a chill ran down her spine at the touch of cool metal encasing her hand. There was no lining, just the metal pieces jointed and hinged and bending with her fingers when she tried to make a fist.

"I'll record from my station," Tosh said suddenly, and everyone turned to look at her at once, which almost would have been funny in other circumstances. "I'm sorry, I can't look her in the eye. Sorry."

Ianto, who hadn't said much until now, pulled his hands out of his pockets. "I--" No further explanation was forthcoming, but Jack just shot him a look that Gwen couldn't quite interpret as he turned and left the autopsy bay. She didn't think anyone could begrudge him that.

Neither of the other men made a move to leave, though, which was probably good since both of them were needed for this. Jack turned back only once Ianto was out of sight, nodding at her reassuringly, and she stepped up to the head of the gurney, gazing down at Suzie's still figure. She looked cold, grey, hair slightly damp where frost from the freezer had melted in it - normal, apparently, though she knew intellectually that cryogenics wasn't just a matter of freezing and defrosting. 

She took a breath to steady herself. "Any advice? Yeah, I know," before they could actually answer, "empathy. Even though she did try to kill me."

"You and me both," Jack said, and she shot him a look. 'Try' wasn't really a word that applied, in all technicality. But she was stalling.

Realising she'd need to be on the other side to properly cradle Suzie's head, she moved around the gurney and carefully put her hand into place. She immediately gasped - there was no way she was imagining that. It felt... like nothing she could describe, like a tugging that wasn't really pulling anything out, a pain in her heart that didn't hurt, a _sense_ that the edges of her were tangled up in someone else. She saw the Plass, at night, Jack being shot in the head-- her, shooting him, except that she was Suzie, and then there was the cold kiss of a gun in the fleshy underside of her chin and her finger twitched reflectively as Suzie-her pulled the trigger.

"No vital signs," she dimly heard Owen reporting, but she was more caught up in the memories. Suzie-her was holding a gun on herself, and did she really look like that when she cried?

"Come on, Suzie," she whispered, trying to reach out for her, to snag that feeling of her consciousness. It was hard to work her mind like that and twice she felt as though she was just brushing against something before the connection-- _sparked_.

On the gurney, Suzie's eyes opened wide and she gasped, though the word didn't seem sufficient to describe the sharp inward rush of air.

Immediately, Jack stepped forward so that he was firmly in her line of sight. "Suzie? Listen, it's me."

Suzie was panicked; Gwen could feel it, almost but not quite as though it was her own emotion, like a thin veil was separating their minds. "I've gotta go," she moaned. "I can't stay, they know!"

"Just look! Look at my eyes, look at where you are."

"I've got to go!"

"Suzie! Look at me!" There was an edge of sternness in Jack's voice, and that was what got her attention, got her gaping at Jack and trying to look around, and there was a horrid wet squelch as the wound at the back of her head mashed against the surface of the gurney. 

"Oh my god, I shot myself," she breathed.

"We've got to ask you about Pilgrim. Names and details. _Who did you retcon?_ "

The panic and confusion were still too strong. "Who's using the glove?" Suzie demanded, as though that were obviously the most relevant thing at the moment. Except, it almost seemed to Gwen that it was, even as she felt impatience and a too-strong awareness of time slipping past.

It seemed like an intrusion much more personal than if she'd gone through Suzie's things or even read her diary, and bizarrely she felt tears stinging at her eyes. "I'm sorry!"

A flash of annoyance, jealousy, bitterness. "Oh, wouldn't you know it. Gwen bloody Cooper."

She looked helplessly at Jack, and his jaw tightened as he moved further into Suzie's line of sight, making himself into a powerful, threatening figure. "When you were in Pilgrim you gave someone the amnesia pill. _Do you remember?_ "

Finally, Suzie focused on him, as above them Tosh called the thirty second mark from her station. "You brought me back for _Max?_ " she asked in disbelief.

A name. Good. "We need to find him," Jack insisted. "Who is he? What's his surname?"

"Just some _loser_ ," Suzie spat, and Gwen could feel her disgust even as she heard it in her voice.

Owen issued a clipped warning, and Gwen tightened down on the connection, trying to visualise her mind as a clenching hand as she swore. Suzie's own emotions were influencing hers, she realised, adding sharp edges to her determination and turning it into antagonism, competitiveness. Well, that was alright. If Suzie could manage the glove, so could she. She was damned if she was going to slip away before they got anything useful. 

"Don't force it," Jack warned her, but easing up seemed like the worst of ideas then. Already the feel of Suzie's mind in hers was thinning out, watering down, and she _pushed_ with her mind to follow--

The zap was like hitting an electric fence, and her mind dimmed suddenly as though it was what had powered the jerk that had her hand slamming away from Suzie's head. Momentum carried her backwards, and immediately Jack lunged to catch her.

"I told you to stop!" He was nearly shouting, his voice filled with the sort of worry that sounded like anger, and oh how she'd heard that tone so many times before. She felt strange, weak, like she was made of jelly and all she could do was cling to him even as Owen moved to reach for her hand, press fingers to her wrist.

"Okay, pulse, yeah," he was saying, and she let her eyes close. Between the two of them, she felt safe, and tired. "She's alright. We need to get her out of here."

"It's the glove," Jack muttered. "I told you, they get hooked."

"Oh, is that what you think?"

Both men froze at the voice, and Gwen struggled to bring herself back to full alertness. She got her feet under her, at least, and Owen helped her to stand so that they could see the gurney. More importantly, so they could see Suzie.

Her eyes were open. Gwen's thoughts went immediately to the glove she was still wearing, and reached to yank it off. The metal scraped against her skin and probably taking a couple of layers off in her haste, but when it clattered noisily onto the floor Suzie was still staring waspishly at them.

"Oh, bloody hell," said Owen.

*

"Respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, body temperature, brain activity," Owen listed, leaning against the table in the conference room where they were gathered. Suzie was strapped to the gurney in autopsy still, the cells not as well-equipped as the autopsy bay to provide the proper information on what was going on. "Death isn't as simple as people think. We can restart or bypass hearts and lungs, and you need the right equipment to distinguish between a coma and brain death. Even brain death is up to debate because you can argue all day about how much activity is enough to sustain life. Anything from the neo-cortex to the cerebral cortex or even the whole brain can--"

"Fascinating as this is, can we focus on Suzie?" Jack sounded bored, and not for the first time Owen wished the team was a bit bigger, maybe another doctor even. It was all very well writing papers on the biology of weevils and the terminal pressure point of organisms possessed by alien gas monsters, but it wasn't like there was a Journal of Xenobiology or conferences where he could talk about this stuff without people's eyes glazing over. 

Rolling his eyes, he clicked the slide remote to bring up the scans he'd gotten from Suzie. "Heartbeat and respiration are non-existent. Body temperature is way below normal and brain activity is present but non-typical. I reckon by any legal definition I'd be within rights of signing her death certificate. Again."

"Okay, so where's the energy coming from?"

Gwen shifted uncomfortably as Owen, Jack and Ianto all tried not to look at her. She still looked a bit peaky, but not enough to really be worrying; still, Owen reminded himself to check her over again later. "Yep, I ran the footage through the Philemon filter. For those late to the class, it detects biochemical energy, which is how Jack is keeping Teaboy here ticking, since he seems to have a pretty much infinite amount of it. But in this case, nothing. There is absolutely no connection between Suzie and Gwen. The only thing I can think of... the glove's doing it somehow."

"Different gloves do different things," Ianto suggested.

Owen reckoned he could have figured that out about the time he'd noticed Suzie didn't have a bloody heartbeat. "Yeah. Well. She's stable, so you want to toss her into the interrogation room, it's fine by me."

"That's my cue, then." Jack pushed his chair back, the legs scraping irritatingly on the floor in a way that made Owen cringe a little. Still, least he never insisted on Owen explaining things they both knew Jack would never understand. 

And he was buggered if he was going to get roped into dragging Suzie round the base. "Right, if we're quite done, I've got samples to analyse," he announced. He was going to have to send Archie a thank you note - he had brilliant timing sometimes.

*

The atmosphere in the Hub was strained as Ianto and Tosh sat at her station, the feed from the interrogation room pulled up on her monitor with the sound turned up loud enough to stream down to the autopsy bay where Owen was working. The angle was awkward, really, for making out expressions, but Ianto definitely preferred it to actually being in the room with them - it was alright for Gwen, he supposed, but considering his own past with gloves, far too unnerving for it to be something he'd be willing to throw himself into. 

Somewhere, Gwen had found Suzie a headscarf to hide the gaping wound at the back of her head, something for which he was immensely grateful. They'd settled her into a wheelchair, one of Toshiko's devices strapped to her wrist to monitor life signs and energy readings, in the hopes that something would come up that would show them what was going on. In the meantime, Jack had had them pull out and blow up a picture of each of the individuals from the Pilgrim photos, and had them now spread out on the table in front of Suzie.

So far, she was ignoring them. "How long's it been?" she asked, her voice a low moan that ran down Ianto's spine. Even worse that he distinctly remembered being in her position - that was probably even the same wheelchair - asking the same question.

"Three months," Jack told her, and he closed his eyes and heard instead the words Jack had said to _him_ , nearly in this exact same position; _'Nearly two months. It's August twenty seventh.'_

"Alright?" Tosh asked, voice hushed, and he jerked a nod.

"The glove's different." Suzie sounded confused and almost plaintive. "What did you do? It's wrong, it's all wrong."

The slightly pixelated Jack in the screen shrugged, shoulders rising and falling easily. "Different glove. The old one had an incident. It's gone now."

She lifted her head slightly, looking as though it was an effort, and Ianto suddenly wondered if she had a headache, if she could feel the opening in the back of her skull at all. If she was dead, were nerve endings still working? Could she feel pain, or heat, or even texture? "That's why I'm still alive, is it? Can't you just let me go?"

"Doesn't work like that. You help us, we'll see what we can do about reversing it. Right now, you're not going anywhere."

"Bastard." She held up a hand - for what purpose, Ianto didn't know - and then seemed to change her mind, letting it fall again. "Can I see my father?"

"No."

"You wiped your records," Gwen added. It was the first time she'd spoken, and her voice was soft and comforting. It was almost funny, really - no one would have spoken to Suzie like that when she was alive, before they'd known about the glove, but then Gwen couldn't have had much contact with her. She wasn't to know what she was like, how tough she was. "We had no trace of him."

"So, he doesn't even know I'm dead?"

 _Welcome to the club,_ Ianto thought. _What did you think would happen?_ Then again, she probably hadn't - thought about it, that was. According to the records he'd found when he was catching up on everything he'd missed, she'd put a gun to her head after being revealed as a serial killer. Not exactly time to take care of practical details, in a situation like that.

"You started it," Jack told her coolly. "Right now, we've got an investigation underway. Pilgrim." He splayed the fingers of one hand across some of the photos on the table, pushing them towards her. "You said you gave Retcon to someone called Max. How do we find him?"

Suzie scoffed, shaking her head, and Ianto winced a little at the way it seemed almost to flop on her neck. "What _for_? He was just an ordinary bloke."

"We think the Retcon triggered a psychosis. He's started killing."

There was a moment of silence; it was hard to see what was happening, but Suzie seemed to be staring at Jack as the news sunk in. Finally she spoke again. "How many victims?"

"Three," Gwen told her. "Same as you."

"Well that's hardly _my_ fault, is it? How was I to know he was going to go psychotic?"

She sounded a little petulant, like a child being blamed for something unfair, and a moment later Owen stuck his head over the stair railings from the autopsy bay, some kind of medical equipment in hand and a frown on his face. "Ask how much Retcon she gave him."

Obediently he leaned over to press the intercom button for the interrogation room. "Owen needs to know how much Retcon he took."

At the sound of his voice, Suzie started, turning awkwardly to stare up at the camera, then turned back to Jack. "Got a replacement in, did you?" she asked scathingly. "Token pretty Welsh boy to round out the team? How long til this one self-destructs?"

"Answer the question, Suzie." Jack sounded patient, but Ianto thought he could recognise hard lines in his voice and the way he sat that said he was starting to get tired of this conversation. Not unexpected - Jack was only selectively patient, when the waiting would at least be somehow enjoyable.

"Once a week, every week, for two years."

A stunned silence fell over them, the three in the main Hub glancing at each other uneasily at the revelation. Ianto had never had much to do with the medical side of things, but he'd issued Retcon before and had the safety lecture, read the pamphlets. There'd been experiments with Retcon before, but even those had never been so extensive. There was just no precedent they could go on to predict what might happen to a person with that much Retcon usage.

Jack was noticeably more agitated as he shoved the pictures across the table at her again. "He's already killed these three people," he told her, stabbing at each one with a finger. "We need to know if there's a pattern, a way we can predict his movements so we can bring him in."

She leaned forward a bit, finally, to peer at the photos. "That's Mark and Sara, they ran it, and Alex, he always brought food. Sandwiches, quiches, you know. He liked to do that sort of thing."

Gwen nodded like that made perfect sense to her. Well, police skills had to come in handy _sometimes_ , Ianto assumed. "So they all contributed the most to the group. Who else fits that pattern?"

"I don't know! Why can't you just leave me alone?"

"Think, Suzie. Or people will die. We usually consider that to be a bad thing." The force of her righteous indignation helped her in staring Suzie down, and a moment later their deceased colleague was looking over the photos again.

Finally she picked one out, sliding it across to Jack. "That blonde girl. Lucy, Lucy Mackenzie, she's a student, she'd always take notes and if you missed a week you could borrow them, if you cared. She works at this club..."

"Which one?" Jack demanded. (Quite masterfully, Ianto noticed, and made a mental note to himself to compliment him on that later. Maybe throw in a remark on how terrifying he was, Jack would love that.)

"I can't remember.... Wolf, I think. The Wolf Bar."

Jack was half out of his seat by the time she'd finished speaking, Gwen following, and he raised his voice so the mics would pick it up even as he left the room. "Owen, you're coming with us. Stun guns and cuffs, we want him alive."

*

Ianto could feel Suzie watching him. They had brought her up to sit with Toshiko, observing the team as they went after Max. Unless he'd gone to hide in the Archives, keeping her from seeing him was impossible. _Fuck it,_ he'd thought, and decided to simply go about his work as matter-of-factly as he could manage. So far she had said nothing to him, just... watched him. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, made his skin prickle. Suzie always had been intense as hell, and yeah, people said that about him sometimes too, but it was different. With him they just meant he didn't do anything half-heartedly. Suzie felt like an explosion was simmering just under her skin and she was always reining it in tightly to keep it from going off.

He hesitated before making a fresh cup of coffee, pulling his and Tosh's mugs from the cupboard and pausing with his hand hovering over Suzie's. Did he bring her one or not? She hadn't had anything to eat or drink since they'd... revived her, though he recalled not being particularly hungry for a while afterwards himself. Sort of hard to worry about that sort of thing when you were recovering from a broken neck and a stab wound to the chest, really. They were different gloves though, and more importantly it just felt impolite to hand Toshiko a cup and snub Suzie, even if she had been repeatedly retconning a man into psychosis and murdering people to test the glove on. Of course, they were different gloves, and he wasn't even sure Suzie's digestive system would exactly agree with the coffee.

After a moment he lowered his hand, a frown tugging at his mouth as he went through the process of pouring the drinks and flavouring them to specification - cream and half a sugar for Toshiko, straight black for him.

When he came back out to Tosh's station it was just in time to see Jack waving a stun gun around on the monitor and overpowering Max in a terribly manly fashion. "How dashing," he murmured drily as Toshiko accepted her coffee with an offhand thanks, and let his gaze linger for a moment on the action, briefly considering the possibilities in a nice rousing game of 'resisting arrest' after hours sometime.

"No coffee for me, then, I suppose," Suzie noted sourly.

He did not flinch. "You don't seem to have a functioning digestive system." Internally he was quite pleased at how steady his voice was. He wasn't fully facing her, still, but he can see out of the corner of his vision that she had awkwardly turned her head to stare at him openly.

"You know you look just like this dead body I came across recently downstairs."

Now he flinched, something which no doubt satisfied her immensely. This was not something they talked about, often, any of them, tactfully stepping around the issue. Even when his condition came up, whether as a relevance or in the odd conversation, they didn't refer to the initial cause of death itself. Leave it to Suzie to blast right through that faux-bubble of cushioning around his personal dysfunctions. "I hadn't asked," he commented in a carefully measured tone, "who found that."

"You used my glove," she accused.

Toshiko was sitting uncomfortably between them and this conversation was too weirdly personal, too intimate for him to be okay with having in public like this, so he set his coffee cup down and grabbed the back of the wheelchair. They could talk while he took her back to the interrogation room. "I didn't exactly have a choice in the matter," he pointed out. It felt strange to discuss it like this, like it was almost normal, like they both shouldn't be dead in a morgue drawer instead of up and walking around (for a given value of 'walking'). He wasn't sure it should be something you discussed calmly and rationally. "Usually people who kill themselves don't do it because they want to be brought back."

Suzie scoffed a bit at that, though her exact meaning was a little unclear. "Why'd he do it then? Why do you get a free pass at life, if you hate it so much?"

"I don't hate it anymore." That, of course, hardly answered her question. He was silent a moment, though; as a philosophical question, it was something he didn't know how to explain. Even to himself. There probably was no explanation. He'd been around Torchwood long enough to know that sometimes things just were, and any meaning you could get out of it was probably all down to personal interpretation of random events and coincidences. Even if you could identify the events and actions that had led to something, that didn't really mean anything in the end. There was no over-arching plan, or not one that was that detailed, at least. And in a technical sense, well, it was a little embarrassing, wasn't it? He was alive because he hadn't been thorough in cleaning up his files. Because his security systems had extended beyond his subdirectory in the Mainframe. A whim of fate and a single overlooked fact. "I installed some added security on the computer for some of the tech brought down from London. They set it off and couldn't figure out how to reverse it and break the lockdown. Tosh could have done it, but it would have taken too long and they couldn't leave the Rift undefended."

He sounded - felt - like he was dully reciting facts out of a history book.

"So that's it, then. Someone trips an alarm and you get to be here, living, breathing, cleaning up Jack's shit. And all I get is a hole in the head." The comment made him grimace a bit - from behind her, he could see the way her makeshift scarf clung to her skull in places-- or rather, what was under her skull. The colour was stained a little and he tried not to notice, not to think about what was causing it.

He wondered where she'd done it. He hadn't read the files in detail, it felt too morbid, like people on the internet watching viral videos of people being beheaded in the Middle East as some kind of bizarre entertainment. "Just think, at least you made them clean up after you," he deadpanned. It really wasn't funny, and he wouldn't have said it around the others, but he thought Suzie would appreciate the twist of it, somehow. 

They had reached the interrogation room and he had to steady the chair carefully to get it down the steps - really, the Hub was _awfully_ designed, and maybe it had more character than London but at least the tower had been easy to get around. He felt strangely reluctant to leave her there though, actually, and his eye fell on one of the chairs as they reached the floor, pulled out a little from the table.

"And you picked the tidiest method you could," Suzie noted. Her head rolled a little on her shoulders as she turned to look at him. "Typical."

He shrugged. There wasn't much he could say to that, really. It was true after all. "Did it take long enough to hurt?"

She stared at him for a moment in silence before answering. "Yeah. Not much. Probably not even a second. But yeah, it hurt. I felt it ripping through my skin and into my brain, and then it went dark and I couldn't feel anything, but it felt like I could."

"Like when you close your eyes after looking at a light," he said softly. He remembered that. It had been awful, that darkness, a place with no sensation and no time. He'd been there forever and for no time at all, which was probably what infinity was like, big enough to drive you mad. "It was a couple of seconds for me. Just falling, and then feeling the rope bristles against my skin, digging into my throat so I couldn't breathe. And then my neck snapped, and suddenly I couldn't feel my body at all." He'd been lucky, too, he'd found out after he'd come back. Even breaking your neck didn't always result in immediate or fast death - he'd had to tear into his spinal column for that, and if it had happened differently he would have hung there, alive, for two, three, four minutes as the rope or spine damage slowly suffocated him. The actual suffocation he thought he might be able to handle, oxygen deprivation often leading to giddiness and euphoria as it did, but the way the rope had dug into him, the itchiness and pain, he was glad to have skipped.

"What about after?" Suzie asked. She was watching him intently now, eyes narrowed slightly. "Did you feel anything in the dark?"

He'd almost managed to forget about all of this, but he supposed after this conversation it was all going to be fresh in his mind again for a while. He resisted the urge to shiver. "Something," he said instead, bleakly. "Something... moving."

She nodded, staring blankly at nothing in particular as they fell into a brief silence. It was broken not by either of them speaking, though, but the sound of the intercom clicking on. "Ianto?" Tosh's voice echoed through the room. "The SUV's pulling in now."

The legs of the chair made a scraping sound as he abruptly pushed it back and he winced, sparing a moment to physically lift it as he tucked it back in under the table. He glanced at Suzie once on his way to the door. She wasn't looking at him, instead apparently lost in her own head, and he turned his back on her, pulling the door closed behind him as he took the stairs two at a time on his way up.

*

Sometimes, Owen thought, they really did need another doctor. Course the problem was that it was never spread out right. Half the time they'd be sitting there tossing popcorn in the air and trying to catch it, doing sudoku or silly magazine quizzes out of Gwen's Cosmos, a lot of "hurry up and wait" as Jack called it. Then suddenly the Rift would go off and they'd all have five things to do at once and never anywhere near enough hands or heads.

They'd managed to shove Max in a cell, still sedated. He was bloody huge and Owen's shoulders ached from helping to move him, even with gurneys and everything. Seeing as how he was still out cold, he'd dashed back upstairs to check on Suzie's readings, and that was where he was stalled. The readings coming back from the device they'd stuck around her wrist were weird. Dead weird, excuse the pun. He loaded up files, analysis programs, running queries and whatever he could think of, but when they were all done (excepting the ones that typically ran for a couple of hours, of course, because there was no way he was waiting for those right now) he still didn't really have a good frame of reference for what was happening.

"Jack!" he called, assuming that their boss would be hanging around somewhere where he could hear his name. He heard heavy footsteps clanging over metal grates, then softer as he hit the cement flooring, then he appeared at the top of the steps.

"Got something?"

"Strange energy readings. From Suzie, I mean. Have a look." He tapped on the screen with a finger, moving aside as Jack came down the stairs carelessly so he could see the results. There was no way you could ever claim Jack was thoroughly versed in medicine, Owen acknowledged that in his own head several times a week sometimes, but he knew an awful lot more than most people about the shit Owen did, and Tosh for that matter. Like his general knowledge was just more advanced than everyone else's. 

He was frowning as he checked things over, leaning on Owen's desk, and Owen could tell when he was finished because he shifted his weight to straighten up a bit. "Theories?"

"It's like it's changing her into something on a cellular level. Making her not human anymore." He pressed a few keys to bring up the CCTV feed from the interrogation room, and they both fell silent, staring at Suzie's image. She wasn't doing anything, and he bet they looked a bit mad, intently studying the image of a woman sitting in a wheelchair in an empty room. She looked the same as normal, though, no outward signs of whatever was going on.

Not that that ever meant anything. He'd learned that a long time ago. Before he'd even heard of Torchwood, if he was honest. 

"Mainframe definitely doesn't recognise it?" Jack asked finally, and Owen shook his head.

"And it's growing. She's at thirty percent. Thirty percent... something else."

For a moment they just looked at each other, then Jack nodded tersely, clapping him on the shoulder. "Okay. Max isn't going anywhere, so focus on this. Bring Toshiko in, see if she can find some kind of connection with the glove. Find out anything you can." He sighed, straightening up to his full height, and Owen pushed himself off the desk in an attempt to not feel quite so short next to him. "It's gonna be a late one."

*

Gwen thought she knew now why Ianto offered them hot drinks so often. Coming down the stairs to the interrogation room, she was wishing desperately that her hands weren't empty, that she had something to offer to explain her coming here, a cup of tea or some biscuits that she could focus on instead of acknowledging that really she was just here to check on Suzie, the image of the woman shakily, nervously pulling a gun out of her bag still seared into her memory.

When she entered the room Suzie didn't look up, and Gwen slid into one of the chairs opposite - the same one that Ianto had taken, incidentally, though she couldn't have known that. She wasn't really sure how to go about this; Jack had asked her to see if there was any sign of what the strange energy Owen had found was doing, if Suzie had noticed anything, though personally Gwen was a little doubtful that she'd even want to help them. It was different for the others. They'd known her longer, worked with her, presumably before she'd gone crazy. The strongest memory Gwen had of her was having a gun pointed at her head.

"What do you want?" Suzie asked suddenly, voice low and almost moaning, and Gwen's hand twitched on the table-top in a start before she could stop the reaction.

"Just seeing how you're doing. If you need anything." It sounded like a weak pretext, and she frowned, drew in another breath. "Is anything wrong?"

"Quite a lot, actually. I'm a _walking corpse_ , forgive me if that doesn't make me dizzy with glee."

There wasn't really much you could say to that. Gwen was fairly certain she'd never heard any platitudes that were appropriate when one caused the dead to rise and turned them into a zombie. She deliberately held back a 'it can't be all bad', knowing that it would only result in another sarcastic reply and even more of this strange tense awkwardness. Right. Might as well go at this head on. "It's just-- we've picked up some funny readings, and we wanted to see if you'd noticed anything. If you felt different at all."

"I don't." She straightened up a bit, and Gwen thought she seemed stronger now. Her head certainly wasn't flopping around as much as it had, and the thought caused a bit of a hysterical giggle to bubble up in her gut, though she managed to hold it back before it escaped. "What funny readings?"

She deserved to know, didn't she? Gwen would want to know, if it were her. "Your cells are transforming into an unidentifiable energy. They said it's at about thirty percent."

"Well that's just _brilliant_. Bloody Torchwood. Can't even get away from it when you're dead." Her gaze fell on Gwen almost slyly. "It owns you, you know. Body and soul. Best and worst job in the world."

And god, wasn't _that_ the truth. She thought about sex aliens and ghosts and the London branch, and Weevils and firearms training and the force of Jack's smile. Sometimes she felt a little bit like she was drowning and he was her life-raft. She couldn't talk to Rhys about any of it, after all, just pass it all off as special ops, classified luv, and sit there pretending there wasn't proof of alien life just a few miles from their thoroughly ordinary flat. It was more than living a double life, it was like being two different _people_ , and one day soon she was going to forget which was which or how to be one entirely, and she had a strong suspicion she knew which one was going to get lost in the fray. She thought Jack probably did, too, and that that was why he made so sure to remind her to hold on to her "normal life". It didn't much matter to the confusion in her brain, though - she still didn't have anyone to really talk to about all this, just get down and nut it all out. Not when Jack kept pulling back from her.

Suzie was one hell of a strange alternative, really, but at the very least right now, in this moment, she felt a bit of a connection. Just enough to screw up her courage and ask, "What's it like? When you die? I mean, what happens?"

Suzie didn't laugh in her face or anything, which was a start. "What do you want me to say?"

"The truth."

"Really?" Her eyes glinted in amusement, which made Gwen think that probably the answer wasn't something that would make her feel better, but she nodded anyway.

"Tell me."

"Are you religious?" Suzie asked, sounding about halfway actually interested in the answer.

It was a surprisingly hard question to answer accurately. It wasn't like she was a Jesus freak or anything, she didn't go around Bible bashing or condemning people for their sins, but 'no' didn't entirely sit right with her either. "Just, sort of in passing," she decided, hoping it would convey the right meaning, "you know."

"Do you believe in Heaven?"

That one was easier. The 'yes' died on her tongue though, because she really thought she knew what was coming. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do," Suzie laughed, and Gwen was right, about the connection. There was something there; they knew each other. "What do you believe?"

"Stupid," she admitted, "but I always sort of think... Like, you know, white light and all that. And I think of my Gran. Like she'll be there, waiting for me. The smell of carbolic." She smiled a little without meaning to, remembering the weekends as a child and being taken to her Gran's place for the day, running in the yard and scraping her knee and having that awful stuff dabbed on it with a cotton bud.

Suzie laughed again. "Your faith never left primary school."

It was probably true, but Gwen still had to try not to feel stung by it. "So what's out there?"

"Nothing," Suzie replied bleakly. "Just, nothing." She looked at Gwen with something dark and hopeless in her eyes, and she actually shivered at it, an uncontrollable reaction that always left her feeling utterly stupid and cliched. "Why didn't you ever ask Jack's boy, then?"

"Ianto?" she asked, surprised, then realised that they wouldn't have overlapped very much. They probably hardly knew each other, and if Jack had been the one who hired Ianto - well, he did have a special interest in him, but she'd figured that was to do with the whole immortality bit. "He's not very easy to talk to, really."

Even as she said it she felt a bit of a twinge of guilt. She was supposed to be the human one, after all. She really was going to have to make more of an effort with him, that was all, which might be a bit easier, having seen him looking so normal that morning. It helped to remember there was actually a person under the suits, and quite a young one at that.

And she should probably go and tell Jack what Suzie had said, she realised. After actually having that moment of camaraderie with her it felt cruel to just leave her again, and she was standing with a great deal of reluctance when, quite suddenly, Suzie sagged in her chair. "Shit!" Gwen swore, rushing towards her and tapping her earpiece before fluttering a little, trying to remember procedure for this. "Owen, it's Suzie, get down here! She's just collapsed!"

Owen got out some reply, a meaningless "yeah" or "on my way" or "hold on tight" as Gwen got a hold of Suzie's wrist, searching for a pulse - use the first two fingers, something in her mind recited, not the thumb - before remembering that that was just going to be useless. No pulse. No breathing. The medical equipment had picked up electrical impulses in the brain or however they talked about brain activity but she didn't have any of that there, nothing that would tell her whether Suzie had just closed her eyes as a cruel prank or if she was actually-- whether she was gone, now, whatever was keeping her conscious gone for good.

She was just starting to hear hurrying footsteps nearby when Suzie jerked upwards again, trying to draw in breath despite how useless a gesture it was. "Gwen!" she was calling, almost crying, "No, don't send me back there! Gwen, help!"

"Shush, shh, it's okay. Owen!"

He burst in with a somewhat self-evident, "Yeah, I'm here," before he was waving some kind of medical implement in Suzie's face, staring at it like it had all the answers in the universe. Between the table and the wheelchair and the size of the room, Gwen was in the way, and she stood up and backed away a bit to give him more room, staring at Suzie's confused and panicked expression. Something was seriously wrong here.


	4. Chapter 4

Back in the conference room, Owen clung to his coffee mug like it was a buoy, far too aware of the late hour. It was strong and had just enough sugar in it, as well as something he could never quite figure out but that still made it so much better than plain coffee. In his more cynical moments he half-suspected it was some kind of addictive substance that Ianto was putting in their drinks so he'd be indispensable and they could never get rid of him, but then he drank it anyway and contented himself with the fact that even if it was true, there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Tosh was stifling a yawn, Gwen fidgeting with her hands, while Jack just looked grim. Up on the biggest of the monitors was a scan of Suzie's body, lurid and bright against the plain blank wall, the energy he still couldn't identify shown as vivid marks against her normal, human, anatomy. 

"Owen?" Jack asked, as though he'd just said something that required feedback. Since this was the first word out of his mouth since they'd sat down, it took Owen's mind a moment to catch up, and he took it as a sign he should have another gulp of coffee.

"It's at over forty percent," he reported briefly. "Working on an estimate for how long til it takes over completely, but it's not going at a constant speed. What I can say is, it's more in the realms of hours than weeks."

"Any idea where the energy's coming from?"

"Presumably the same place as the glove," Tosh volunteered. "Which, judging from its atomic makeup, isn't anywhere local."

"Same place she went when she blacked out, maybe," he mused, more thinking aloud than anything else. Of course, that wasn't really a proper place. Gwen had been able to see her for the whole thing, she'd just... gone somewhere in her mind, her consciousness leaving her body momentarily. He'd even looked at the scans, and sure enough brain activity had ceased temporarily for what seemed to be the length of the attack. No reason to think she'd been faking it, then. "A dark place."

Jack shoved his chair back to get up and start pacing, like he couldn't actually think if he wasn't in motion. Reminded Owen of a wind up toy, sometimes, how you had to turn the key to get it going and then just let it run itself down. "What are we talking about, then? Another dimension? Parallel universe?"

"She said there was something in the darkness." There was something a bit off about Gwen's voice, but he couldn't spare the mental energy to figure out what. She was a big girl, she could sort herself out well enough. Gaping bloody wounds, that was more his thing. 

It was enough for them all to keep looking at her though, thinking about what she said. He wasn't even sure why it felt as creepy as it did. Human fear of the unknown, probably. For all everyone made out like they were the best thing that happened to the planet since the poly-celled organism, they had an awful lot of animal-like instincts and behaviours still.

The moment was broken only when Ianto bustled into the room - fresh pot of coffee in his hands, good man. He set it down on the tray on the table and Owen made a grab for it to refill his cup. "Think you'd better see this," he told them, using his now-free hands to tap at the monitor controls to bring up the internal CCTV. He pulled the feed from the interrogation room and went to playback.

For a couple of seconds it all seemed normal, Suzie leaning sideways against the wall (yeah, he wouldn't want it at the back of his head either if his skull was blown out) not doing anything. Then she slumped for a moment, and when she looked up there was something funny about her eyes. Ianto increased the image size quickly and sharpened the resolution until they could see that they were solid black, not just shadowed like he'd thought. 

" _Melenkurion abatha... duroc minas mill khabaal_!" Suzie said - or at least, something in her body did. It was nothing like her regular voice, rasping and bigger than it should have been like it came from somewhere else entirely.

"When was this?" Jack demanded.

"Right before I came up. Two minutes ago, tops."

Jack paused to think, and Owen glanced around before taking the opportunity to put forth a radical idea. "Right, anyone else think it's time to kill her again?"

Immediately, Tosh whipped her head up to glare at him with a shocked, censuring, "Owen!"

"Well it's not like Ianto," he defended, waving a hand at the monitor. "Look at her. Half of her's not even human and the other half's dead tissue. I mean, all we have to do's shoot the glove, right?"

"She's still a person!"

"Actually, Owen's right," Jack said, surprising all of them - Owen not the least of all. "Right at the start we said that if anything went wrong we'd know how to fix it. I don't know about you guys, but personally, the Rift throws enough at us that I don't feel a need to deal with that." He jabbed a finger at the paused playback on the screen, Suzie's dark eyes glittering at them all. "We've got Max in custody. Experiment over."

He pulled his Webley from its holster and swept out of the room, Ianto on his heels, and Owen hurriedly pushed his chair back to follow. Leaving the conference room with Jack in the lead they resembled nothing if not one of those walking school buses, and he had to swallow back a bit of mirth at that - but hell, there wasn't a single one of them who wouldn't drop everything when Jack called, was there? For all his faults, you had to give him that.

The glove was sitting still in the autopsy bay, and Owen moved past Jack to pull the interrogation room feed up on his computer so they could make sure everything worked right. He didn't need to look around to know exactly where everyone stood - this was his area, and he'd been working here plenty long enough to have an innate feeling for the place. The girls were up the top of the stairs, Jack to the right and behind him, Ianto hovering on the bottom step like he wasn't quite sure whether or not he wanted to really be in the room. Each of them was almost like a little blip on his internal radar.

"So we're just going to rush into this?" Gwen asked.

Jack checked the chamber of his gun, clicked it back into place and flicked off the safety, all in the space of a second or two. "Yep." The sound of the shot made Owen wince, though that could also have been due to the way the glove _shattered_ , pieces of metal spinning off in all directions - one hurtled past him, narrowly missing embedding itself in his arm, and he swore loudly and colourfully.

"Sorry!" Jack announced, not looking very sorry at all. It was mostly the mad grin that gave it away; Owen was often proud of his observational skills. Shaking his head, he turned back to the monitor-- and swore again. 

Even as he checked that it was actually up to date and he wasn't just seeing Suzie's time lagged image still moving, the others were coming down the stairs to see what he was pissed off about. It was Ianto who spoke first. "Shit," he murmured, making Owen raise an eyebrow. When even the teaboy was swearing, you knew you were in the crapper.

When the Mainframe confirmed that the time lag was under half a second he straightened up with a frown, moving back so they could all see. "Any more great ideas?"

*

The Hub's translation programs were something that Toshiko was understandably proud of. Not being exactly official, most of Torchwood Three's technology was cobbled together from a strange mixture of the local contemporary materials and things that had either fallen through the Rift or found their way to Earth by other means, such as crashing ships and teleports. Such a system meant that Mainframe was far more advanced than anything anyone else had at this time, but it also made things a little bit muddled at times, with programs unsynchronised and different parts of Mainframe that were difficult to make talk to each other. It was nearly four years now since she'd come to work for Jack, and she'd spent a lot of that time soothing and coaxing the systems (and she didn't care what Owen said, she was sure they couldn't be entirely mechanical and unintelligent) into some semblance of order.

The translation programs were one of her pet projects, the things she kept returning to in the days and weeks when Rift activity slowed to a crawl and they found themselves teetering more or less on top of things. Admittedly, the definition of "on top of things" had changed a little recently with Ianto's insistence that "filed" become a rather more specific term with a meaning closer to "filed in a rational and logical system".

The point was that they had come a long way since she'd first had reason to use them, and she had no doubt that running the playback from the interrogation room through her filters would come up with something workable, even if the sample wasn't a particularly big one. She'd once had the opportunity to translate an entire novel that they'd found, the pages thick and made from some kind of reed plant, and since then that language had a near perfect working dictionary on record. A couple of sentences was much less to go on, but that had never stopped her in the past.

So she found it a little bit strange when the computer couldn't manipulate the audio, throwing up protesting beeps and whines instead. She frowned, but in compromise it offered her a text match that it was 89% confident of. It wasn't 100%, but it was something to be going on with, and as much as she itched to coax the program into falling into line, there were priorities to think of.

She glanced behind her to see that the whole team was within earshot, probably not a coincidence. "I shall walk the earth," she read, "and my hunger will know no bounds."

"Catchy," Ianto commented, but when she met his eyes she didn't see any humour in them. The atmosphere was just too tense for it.

Gwen wasn't even trying not to appear unsettled, arms crossed over her body tightly as though she could shield herself from the bogeys and monsters and all the bad things that came from this job. "I've got a really bad feeling about this."

"What was it that got you?" Owen asked. "The retcon-induced serial killing, the zombie downstairs that we have no idea how to get rid of, or this thing trying to get out of her that wants to _eat_ all of us?"

Behind him, Jack cleared his throat, and they fell silent. Even with the situation as it was, Toshiko couldn't quite hold back a small smile - you could say what you wanted about Jack's proclivities and reputation, but you could never say he wasn't a natural born leader. It just clung to him, like a mantle of confidence that other people couldn't help but pay attention to. It made him seem as though he'd never doubted himself in his life, though she knew, when she thought to remember it, that that wasn't true.

When he spoke, though, people listened. "Ianto and Gwen, you're on research," he declared, nodding at them. "The sentence, the language, the dead rising, anything that might give us more information. If it's at all related, I want to know about it. Owen, we're going to need more information on what's happening to Suzie. Double check everything. Triple check it. Second priority is finding another way to deal with her. We can't just leave her in a cell indefinitely. Toshiko, you're with him."

"'Remove the head or destroy the brain' is the usual method, isn't it?" Ianto asked drily, and Owen snorted. When Tosh turned to look at him, he was already setting a mulish, defensive expression on his face.

"Her brain's already mush, but ta for that, Teaboy of the Dead." He waved his hand in a 'run along' gesture and turned towards the autopsy bay. Toshiko had just long enough to share a smile with Ianto before following.

*

It wasn't entirely uncommon, Gwen had found, for people to assume that research and evidence were skills she used often in the police force, that piecing together clues like jigsaw pieces to create a whole picture had been pretty much an everyday thing for her. She blamed tv, mostly, though to be fair sometimes it was just easier to let people think what they wanted - being an imaginary detective was more glamourous, in ways, than being a real beat cop. 

Research, she was finding out now though, was not glamourous. Research was, dare she say it, a little bit boring. At least on the beat there were different situations, different people, ridiculous conversations with Andy while they sat in the car waiting for the next big emergency (where 'big emergency' could be replaced with 'tiff in a bar' at your leisure), but this was rather more about sifting through screens of completely useless information, most of which happened to be utterly tedious just to top things off. She glanced sideways at Ianto, noting that he didn't seem to be having nearly the problems she was - but then, he was an Archivist. For all she knew, he enjoyed this sort of thing.

Closing another window, she switched to the next item in her queue with a sigh, and out of the corner of her vision she thought she saw Ianto's mouth quirk a little bit. "What?" she asked, latching onto something that promised to be far more interesting than the pages they were sorting through. 

Ianto shrugged delicately, silent for a moment, then evidently changed his mind and explained, "You look like you've been sent to sit in the corner."

There wasn't any censure in his tone, and it only took her half a second to decide that offense was the wrong reaction for the comment. Instead she let out a small chuckle. "I can't believe you actually do this sort of thing all day," she admitted. "Don't you get _bored_?"

"Not really. You find some interesting things sometimes." He shot her a small smile, one that had something secretive and confiding in it that she couldn't help but respond to. "You know there are Archival records for all the times an agent has had a sexual encounter with an alien?"

Gwen laughed, and found herself almost surprised at herself for it. For all his deadpan quips, she didn't typically think of Ianto as entertaining, or fun, not in the way Jack was or Owen could be, or even Tosh if you caught her in the right mood. "Does Jack show up in those a lot, then?" she asked, half teasing and half honestly curious.

Ianto's smile turned sly. "About sixty percent, I'd say. He does like to take one for the team sometimes." He tapped out key combinations at speed, fingers fairly flying over the keyboard, and she wondered idly what his words per minute typing speed was. He would have made a good secretary, or receptionist, or personal assistant or whatever people called them these days, if Torchwood wasn't around. After a moment, he added, almost absently, "There are also three instances of pregnancy following incidents. Only two of them were to females."

She only realised she was gaping when he looked up to grin at her. 

She turned back to her computer screen almost flustered, having not entirely expected conversation like this from their buttoned-down, orderly butler. She remembered how he'd looked as he'd come in that morning - the morning before, now, really - tired and hungover and dressed casually, and thought that maybe she was coming a little closer to reconciling the two images in her mind. "You must know a lot about Torchwood, then," she commented.

"We all do, in different ways. Jack has the most experience and more reference points to connect to. Tosh can tell you a lot more about the computer systems, and we'd be useless without those."

She was close enough that if she leaned over a little, she could nudge him in the side with her elbow, teasing and conspiratal. "I think that's why they call it a team. Can you imagine Owen trying to fetch the right file out of the Archives in an emergency?"

Ianto winced. "Don't even joke about it. You'd think someone that smart would be able to comprehend a logical, rational filing system."

Gwen had seen the Archives manual that was the guide to the alpha-numerical system used to order and locate documents, and privately thought that 'smart' wasn't necessarily enough to be able to understand the whole thing. She'd seen how possessive Ianto could get over the Archives (and the coffee machine, for that matter) though, and didn't feel any real need to challenge him on the topic. "Still, there's Tosh," she offered, and Ianto smiled a little.

"Yes," he agreed. "There is, at that."

A part of Gwen had the rather disturbing urge to squee a little bit at the idea of two of her colleagues actually starting to date and enjoy the real world, and she quashed it carefully. It would hardly do to push herself into their lives too much, not when things were obviously still new and possibly not entirely formed properly yet. Deliberately, she flicked to the next of her windows, working through a section of pages about the black death - not something she thought was very relevant, really, but their search terms had thrown it up, so she had to scan through it anyway before dismissing it out of hand.

They were quiet for a short time, each working through their own sections of the results. Gwen had gotten through two more pages before she stumbled across a familiar looking sentence. "Oh!" she exclaimed, and Ianto looked up sharply to see what had caught her attention. She pointed at the screen. "'I shall walk the earth and my hunger shall know no bounds'!"

Turning the monitor towards him, she let him lean over to read the page in question, admiring the rather vivid-looking illustration that accompanied it as he did so. It was a wood-cut, she thought it had said, though she'd gotten only a glance at the caption before stepping back. Either way, it was the first promising lead they'd gotten so far, and she felt strangely pleased when Ianto looked up with a smile that was somehow approving, as though she were a child he'd just taught to perform a simple task. He presses the 'print' key. "I'll keep looking. Get that to Jack before he stresses himself into a stroke."

*

Everywhere he looked reminded him that time was running down. 

Normally time wasn't that much of an issue for Jack. When you had all of it, it kind of put things into perspective - not that anyone could really understand forever, but a hundred and fifty years of life gave you a glimpse, particularly when you spent most of it watching other people get old and die. All a bit contradictory, really, considering that anyone who knew him would easily agree that he was _not_ the most patient of people. All of time, but none of it when he needed it.

"We're at eighty percent, Jack," Owen announced, spinning lazily in his chair, tapping a pen against his chin. "Not to rush you or anything."

"I'm _thinking_." And pacing, gesturing with his hand as he ran through the thought process again. "What did it say, about what stopped it?"

"I told you, just faith. Death had collected twelve souls, but faith stopped it before it could get the thirteenth." Gwen had tacked the print outs up on the glass wall like the sad, miserable younger cousin of her research into Carys. It hadn't been difficult to figure out that the church in the story had been the same place he'd stolen the glove from, nor that the parish of St James was what was now part of Cardiff, but that was where they had stalled - and unfortunately, that was all academic.

"Not exactly an instruction manual, then," Ianto murmured, and Jack shot him a look.

"So we stop it before it happens," he decided. "Ideas. How do you kill someone who's already dead?"

"Cut her head off," Owen suggested. 

Ianto grimaced at that. "And if it doesn't work? What are you going to do, leave her decapitated head in her lap and bring her to Halloween parties?"

"Well we can't destroy her brain, it's already had a bullet pass through it. She's not just an intact corpse that's been reanimated, she should _be_ dead. She shouldn't have brain function."

"And yet, evidently she does."

Owen made a rude gesture and Jack sighed, dropping his head and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger. "What if we finished the job?" he asked, not looking up. "Took out the whole thing, or-- make mincemeat of it." He didn't have to see anyone's faces to interpret the silence the suggestion was met with. On some level, he knew how they felt. It was hard to reconcile the discussion with the fact that it was _Suzie_ they were talking about, who may have had her flaws (alright, a lot of flaws, particularly at the end - but he held himself partially responsible there for not _noticing_ there was anything wrong) but had still been a member of the team for years. He tried to imagine how they'd practically do it, and was met with a mental image of sawing the top of her skull off and going at her brains with a whisk while she remained fully conscious.

He'd had nightmares about kinder things.

He was glad when Owen suddenly snapped his fingers. "So, she's dead, right?"

Alright, maybe not so glad, unless he was going somewhere brilliant with this. "Yeah, I think we covered that."

"So what do we do with the dead?"

Jack was not the only one who didn't want to answer that. All four of them stared at Owen apprehensively, either half-knowing what he was about to say or just suspecting that it was going to be awful. Sometimes Jack seriously worried about his team, even in the midst of being prouder than hell of them.

"Come on, what do we do?" Owen repeated sharply, pausing only a beat to look around at his audience. "You _embalm_ them. We inject a formaldehyde solution into her veins, it'll petrify the neural pathways and freeze dry her brain. Shouldn't be too bad, even. The formaldehyde might irritate, but ethanol should prevent her from feeling its effect, and she hardly needs to worry about it being a raging carcinogen and all."

There was another brief silence as they digested this, and then Toshiko was nodding, a bit of hesitance in the gesture still but getting stronger. "He's right," she said softly, clearly reluctant. "It's the only way to be sure."

Gwen murmured her agreement, and Jack glanced over at Ianto. Torchwood wasn't a democracy and he didn't need to foster the illusion that it was, but this decision ought to be okay with all of them. He had to at least give them the chance to think about the things they had to do. Ianto met his eyes for a moment, then nodded once; Jack hadn't really thought it would ever be any other answer, not from him. He'd seen enough to know there weren't always easy choices.

"Okay," he said, turning back to Owen. "Get together everything you'll need, we have to do this fast. Where are we at with--"

He'd been getting his wind back up as he spoke, mind racing through the steps they'd have to take to get everything done efficiently and safely, when quite suddenly the room went dark as everything powered off. Everything. Even the doors clunked heavily, automatically locking with the power loss, and he whirled around to search the room wildly for anything still running. There was nothing, and the silence was eerie without the background hum of computers in standby mode, the fans of the ventilation systems, the odd beeping. "What the hell?"

A single light flicked on and he almost had to laugh when he realised that Ianto had already found a flashlight. It was like he could pull anything they needed out of his pockets without even suffering an unsightly bulge to break the smooth lines of his exceptionally well-tailored suits. Off to his other side, Owen was tapping repeatedly at his computer keyboard. "We've gone into lockdown," Ianto noted.

"And it looks like it's one hundred percent." Owen sounded like he'd stuck his pen in his mouth to get both his hands free and was currently talking past it. "We're locked in, Jack. And we're sure as hell not doing any medical procedures."

*

Gwen almost stumbled on the stairs twice, trying to count them in her mind before realising that she wasn't entirely sure how many there were anyway. It was dark, too dark, without even the emergency lighting on, and she was following the sound of Owen's footsteps and the light from his torch more than anything else. They ought to have been moving slower, for safety, but the darkness pressing in on them felt too much like urgency, and without the systems monitoring Suzie they had no idea how much time they had left before she hit one hundred percent. Total conversion.

With Jack, Ianto and Tosh still upstairs working to reverse the lockdown - somehow, however small the chances seemed - she and Owen had been sent down with one of Tosh's favourite pieces of tech, a device that could unlock almost any door. Lucky it didn't rely on mains power, she thought, though a futuristic lock pick probably wouldn't be much use anyway if you could only use it on doors that were next to compatible power plugs.

Owen slapped it onto the door of the interrogation room and she had to halt behind him, waiting as it worked. She felt herself shifting weight from one foot to the other impatiently, and was glad when she heard the click of the lock disengaging.

The door was only halfway open when Suzie called out. "What's going on?"

"Bullshit," Owen muttered. The light from the torch flickered around the room, giving them glimpses of table and chairs, Suzie's face, the bright glint of the metal of the wheelchair. "What do you think? We're in lockdown."

"Why, what happened?" Her voice was sharp and almost would have been convincingly worried if they hadn't all already figured out that Suzie was the obvious culprit for the origins of the lockdown. Why she'd do it was another matter entirely, unless she'd figured out a way to eavesdrop on them and would rather risk the release of the energy that was transforming her body than go back into the darkness.

Apparently Owen was of the same mind, as at her question he merely scoffed. "Funny, I was going to ask you that. How d'you reverse it?"

"I don't know! I don't have access to Mainframe anymore, I'm locked out of the system. How could I do anything?"

"Christ, Suzie, we haven't got _time_ for this!"

Even in the woefully lacking light of the torch her expression seemed to change at Owen's outburst - not paling, never paling, but certainly faltering, and the first time she opened her mouth to reply nothing came out. "What do you mean?" she asked finally, and Gwen didn't think she was faking the trepidation in her voice.

Not eavesdropping, then. Gwen glanced at Owen's silhouette, moving past him in an explicit gesture to shut up. There was no way he would break the news tactfully. He did have his moments of having a decent bedside manner, but they were few and far between and unlikely to occur when he was stressed and pissed off, as was the case now. On the other hand, it was Gwen's strong suit. "Something's changing you," she told Suzie gently. "And very soon it's going to finish, and somehow it will cross over into this dimension. We were coming up with a way to stop it when the base went into lockdown."

Her hearing seemed heightened in the near-pitch blackness; she could hear Owen breathing behind her, but Suzie was deathly silent. (Her brain winced a little and skittered away from the pun.) "How soon?"

"Minutes," Owen cut in, tone grim and unforgiving.

Suzie shifted in her seat, lifting a hand to cover her face, and when she dropped it she looked truly scared. "Max," she whispered, and Gwen turned to look back over her shoulder at Owen. She'd almost forgotten about the man in the cells, and from what she could see of his expression, he probably had as well. He jerked his head at the doorway and hurried off, and she raced after him, thanking whatever was listening that the cells were close to the interrogation room - and that there were no stairs in between.

And another blessing, she realised as they came up to the cells - _lights_. Dim ones, maybe, but enough to see by, as whoever had designed the lockdown systems had evidently decided that this was one of the areas where it was necessary. Owen clicked the torch off and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans, glancing at her and jerking his head further down the corridor; she nodded. There was noise coming from up ahead, a constant low hum like muttering. Perhaps more cautiously than was necessary, they made their way down the line of cells until they reached the one where Max was being kept.

The noise was coming from him, alright. He was seated on the bench, rocking back and forth slightly and repeating something over and over to himself - as she listened, she realised that it was, "Because I could not stop for Death, Death kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality."

"Emily Dickinson?" She frowned, exchanging a glance with Owen.

"If that's part of the system," he said slowly, "Suzie must have installed a vocal command program, way back. When she was still alive. Say that out loud, repeat it over and over and the Hub locks down."

"But that means she planned this," Gwen protested. The idea wasn't entirely far-fetched, especially considering they'd already realised she had to be responsible for the lockdown, but-- why? What could she possibly gain from all of this? "This whole thing, to get in here and... lock us down."

"Boy, do I not like this." He grabbed her arm and pulled until she was following him, picking up speed as they went, headed back upstairs. Jack had to be told about this.

*

Jack was pacing again. This time, though, it wasn't anywhere near as bloody annoying - Owen kind of knew how he felt, actually. They were utterly buggering fucked, now, and even if they could reverse the lockdown right then they wouldn't have time for the whole damn embalming procedure. Besides which, if Suzie had really planned this whole thing, what were the chances she'd _let_ them? Even someone too weak to get out of a wheelchair could put up a good struggle if they had the incentive to.

"She sets it up so we have to bring her back," Jack said, again, because they were all still trying to figure this out and time was running out for him and the girls and the whole world. "And then shuts us down."

"So she can destroy the world?" Owen suggested. The manufactured bored tone in his voice seemed out of place, but he couldn't help it. It was better than fear, anyway.

"But she didn't know about the second glove," Ianto pointed out from where he was sitting near the water tower. He was fiddling with a phone and no one had asked him why. "She thought she'd actually be alive."

Owen stared at him for a moment, thinking it through. "She thought she'd be like Ianto," he started, slowly, but picking up speed. "Coz out of us all, who was the second best with the glove? Jack. Except she didn't know he can't die, did she? So she figured, bringing her back would kill him. And the lockdown... would slow us down while she made her escape."

Gwen turned sharply to stare at him, and he looked down, gaze falling on the device he'd used to unlock the door of the interrogation room. The door they hadn't relocked when they'd run off to the cells. The door which they had, in fact, not even shut properly behind them. Because she was in a wheelchair - but one which they'd put her in, and she'd been holding her head up straight, he was pretty sure. Fuck. She'd just been biding her time.

"She's still in the base," Jack told them, coming to the same conclusion. "We can't get into the armory, but neither can she. Owen, _keep hold of that--_ "

For the second time that night he was interrupted by a clunking as the locks on the doors all disengaged and the computer systems and lights all came back online. There was half a second's silence as they frozen, then they were all leaping to their feet, reaching for weapons if they had them. "Split up," Jack ordered. "Gwen and Owen, go to the garage exit. Toshiko and Ianto, guard the lift and the stairs to the tourist office. I'm going to see if I can find her before she gets anywhere _near_ a way out."

None of them wasted any time moving in their assigned directions; Owen himself only paused to grab up the door unlocker and tossing it to Tosh as he passed her. His hand strayed to his holster, then, glad he'd put it on after they first woke Suzie up. He didn't know if bullets were going to have any affect on whatever came out of her, but the weight of it made him feel better anyway.

And no matter how undead _she_ was, if they riddled her with bullets it'd have to slow her down, just a bit.

*

Even with everything back up and running, there was an air of stillness in the Hub. It was a feeling Jack knew well, one that went hand in hand with exactly this sort of scenario, when the world seemed to understand that there was a predator and a prey at work and everything hushed a little, held its breath and watched to see who would prevail. His Webley fit easily into his hand like it was a part of him, and in some ways it almost was. It was not, after all, an original shelf model. Though he'd had it for a long time, now, he had upgraded it in what ways he could, smoothing out flaws and increasing its capabilities. It still looked like an ordinary Webley in the same way he looked like an ordinary human, but they were both out of their times, a mish-mash of the past and the future.

He knew he was getting near the cells when he could hear the Weevils, though it was not the usual scuffling and snarling that he was used to. They almost seemed to be crying out, their voices echoing around the old stone hallways in low moans and groans. Moving quickly but silently (something that took practice, wearing his military-grade leather boots), he moved towards the sound, aided by his knowledge of the Hub's layout - on his own, he might have gotten lost as the sound bounced around and disguised the point of its origin.

There was no one in the hallway and he relaxed slightly, though still passed through to see if he could figure out what the Weevils were reacting to. It wasn't hard to figure out. In the third cell to his left - Max's cell - there was no longer the sound of chanting, as Owen and Gwen had reported. Instead there was only what had once been Max. The corpse was dessicated, almost mummified, and still sitting slumped on the bench, clothes intact. He had the strange feeling that if he were to go into the cell and poke the body it would simply crumble at his touch, sending the fabric falling to the ground as the contents turned to dust.

The back of his neck prickled as a shadow passed across a wall to his right, causing him to spin in that direction, Webley at the ready, but there was nothing there. Nothing that he could see, at least, and that was hardly a comforting thought.

He reached up to tap his comm, opening the public channel. "I think we can safely say that Death is walking the Earth," he told the team grimly. "Our friend Max is, sadly, no more."

"I was just about to call you," Toshiko replied, her voice in his ear making it sound as though she was standing right by his side, even though he knew full well that she wasn't. "We've just found Suzie on the CCTV."

The news had him tensed instantly, grip tightening on the barrel of his gun as he waited to see which direction he ought to be sweeping off in. "Fantastic. Where?"

Toshiko drew in a breath, and he knew he wasn't going to like what she was about to say. "We missed her. She's already on the Plass."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did what fact checking I could on the locations of buildings etc around the Plass before writing this. Most of that information is from 2009, though, where the fic is set in 2006, so I'm just going to go with it and hope it's correct. If not, well, it's not the most unbelievable thing in the verse. :P

There was only one blessing about this whole damned mess, Ianto decided as he moved through the shadows of the buildings surrounding the Plass, and that was the fact that, at 2.07 in the morning even on a Friday night, there were very few people around to be endangered by either Suzie or the energy that had come out of her. (It felt stupid to call it Death. Stupid and ridiculous and yes, they were a secret underground alien fighting agency with a pterodactyl and an immortal boss who liked to stand on rooftops in a 1940s Air Force greatcoat, but they had _standards_ , dammit.)

He wished they knew what it looked like, at least. And, say, how to stop it, exactly. He wasn't entirely certain there was much it could do to him or Jack, but he didn't really want to find out - or risk the possibility that it could eat their souls _over and over again_. Not exactly a comforting idea. 

There was movement off to his right, and he glanced over to see the light from the waning moon glint of a gun barrel. Tosh, he realised, identifying her petite figure and clothing. He nodded at her and gestured ahead to indicate that he was going to circle around the edge of the buildings, waiting until she nodded back before looking away again. Over the comms he could hear the reassuring check ins from the rest of the team, scattered words here and there that he could tune out for the most part and simply remain aware that all five of them were responding as per normal and hadn't run into any trouble. Yet.

As it turned out, he was the first to find anything at all. He hadn't seen Max's corpse after Jack had come across it in the cells, but they'd all been given a brief description of the condition of it. Still, it hadn't quite been enough to prepare him for the actual thing. 

He was fairly certain the body he came across had been a woman when she was alive, albeit one with stylishly short hair. But she looked as though she'd died long ago, only to be kept in some kind of extremely dry environment, the sort that leeched the moisture out of her body and left her withered and shrunken, skin like brittle parchment. He had, of course, seen dead bodies before, and after Canary Wharf he usually liked to think that nothing much would shock him anymore (though other times, he felt as though the mere hint of something similar, a disembodied limb or a burns victim perhaps, would send him spiraling into nightmarish flashbacks), but even with all his experience with Torchwood he'd never been cut off enough from the world to not feel a shock upon discovering a corpse.

Especially when the thing that had done it could be anywhere.

He flattened himself against a wall, scanning the area nervously as he reached up to tap at his earpiece. "Just found another body," he reported - it would do the double duty of informing them that they were that much closer to thirteen, and reassuring them that he hadn't been eaten by anything. "Down by the Brasserie, coming onto the actual Plass."

"I see you," Owen confirmed, and he couldn't quite stop himself from looking around wildly trying to place their doctor. There were other things moving, though, things that were neither ally nor potential victim nor particularly threatening - night birds and the odd stray animal, rubbish blown across pavement by the brisk sea air - and it was hard to pin anything down. 

"Good," added Jack, and his voice seemed warm, somehow, in Ianto's ear. "Keep moving. We'll come back for them when we've got the area secured."

Despite the fact that he doubted even Toshiko or Owen could see him _that_ well, Ianto nodded at the command, shifting the grip on his gun slightly as he continued his slow slink over the pavement. He was uncomfortably aware that Suzie might have left the area already, not to mention the energy being, and wondered if they shouldn't have left someone inside to cover the CCTV cameras. It was times like these that a bigger staff would be really helpful; they'd never had a problem finding someone when he'd worked at London. Typically they'd have whole departments for each function, and in the event that they _did_ need extras on a particular project, it was easy enough to borrow someone who had similar or transferable experience. He'd been seconded to Archives a couple of times when something big had come in and the usual staff were overwhelmed by the sheer number of items in need of categorising, writing up, cross-referencing, filing and storing. It had been a definite shock to the system to come to Cardiff and find that the team that Jack had been so adamant was complete consisted of four people, half of whom seemed incapable of basic alphabetising. Of course, coming on the heels of a rather more significant shock to the system, and in the greater framework of trying desperately to save Lisa, it had been easy to shake off, but the feeling that they were substantially understaffed still lingered at times - ironically, considering the current situation, only underlined by the replacement of Suzie with Gwen, who did indeed have very good people skills, but who knew substantially less about the things they dealt with than Suzie had. Considering the current situation, that was possibly a good thing.

Gwen herself was the next to report anything new: "Two more, Jack. Looks like a couple, probably out for some fun." That brought them to four, and was shortly followed by Jack's revised instructions,

"Ianto, stay around the bay. Toshiko, come further north, we need to spread out a bit more. Keep the lines open, and if you get in trouble - make sure to scream real loud."

Ianto snorted softly at the last part, which was so very much a Jack thing to say. At least, he thought, they weren't in a highly residential area where they'd wake anyone up. Such things were important considerations when attempting not to indirectly accidentally cause an apocalypse. Apparently it had not been quite soft enough, as it was met with a mock-chiding "I heard that!" that, if the answering giggles were anything to go by, actually managed to dissipate a little of their tension.

Obeying the order, he circled back around in a circuit that would take him back towards the water, moving over to the Pierhead Building. He felt exposed, crossing the open space, and the skin down his back prickled as though he could feel someone - or something - watching him. Imagination, he told himself, but made no effort to relax. It would be safer to keep his senses on high alert, whether it was a case of paranoia or not.

The Plass might have been lit, the pillars that lined the outside edges reaching up towards the night sky and casting their glow over the area except for long fingers of shadow, but the Pierhead Building still loomed darkly ahead of him. It seemed huge and ominous, the clock tower piercing even higher than the pillars and if he had wanted to the see the top of it he felt like he would have had to bend over backwards to get the angle right. Needless to say, it was not at the top of his list of priorities right now.

There was a noise to his left and he spun quickly, the soles of his shoes scraping on stone with the sudden motion, but it didn't take long for him to locate Owen over by one of the benches off the Plass. There was a cardboard box or something not far from him, and Ianto rolled his eyes a little as he realised the sound must have just been Owen kicking it. Startling, but harmless. Turning back, his gaze passed over the old vintage carousel towards the bay itself. --And back again as he did a double take at a sign of movement in the shadows of the horses.

He paused, eyes narrowed a little as he tried to make out what was what, part of the carousel or darkness or rubbish or something alive. His footfalls were soft as he moved forward, each step made carefully and slowly so as not to spook-- whoever, if it was a person.

A few metres closer and he was fairly sure that it was. A person hunched up against the centre of the carousel, sitting on the floor in a forest of children's mechanical riding horses in the middle of the night, something he was sure was probably not the new big thing with kids in Cardiff looking for a thrill. Slowly, he reached up to make sure the mic on his ear piece was turned off. If he turned out to need it, he had practice at turning it back on quickly enough, but for now he'd rather have a go at talking to her, and he'd rather not have an audience for that. "Suzie?" he called softly, and was rewarded when the figure lifted her head. Bingo.

She laughed, and there was a faintly hysterical tinge to it. "Come to kill me, have you? What are you going to do, keep shooting until I don't get back up?"

"No." He relaxed a little - not entirely, not enough to put the gun away - and stepped up onto the carousel, winding his way around the horses to find her. She was huddled there, the scarf they'd found her gone from her head and her long hair tied messily behind her, locks of it bumping up over the top of her skull as though she hadn't had a brush and had used her fingers instead. Glancing around, he spotted a piece of fabric next to her that was probably the scarf. "We're a bit more worried about whatever came out of you."

"You know what it is, don't you?" she asked. "You've felt it. Waiting. Until I brought it out." She laughed again. "Didn't even look twice at me, if it can even see. Oh, god."

"You're already dead," he pointed out. He didn't want to sit down - even if she didn't seem threatening at the moment, that was a little too relaxed for him. Instead, he leaned back against one of the horses, gripping the pole with his free hand. A quick look revealed that it was a unicorn, actually. How sparkly.

"Yeah, just rub it in. Maybe you should shoot me. I was never good for anything anyway. You and Gwen, you just waltzed in and everyone loved you, none of them spared a thought for little old Suzie. I was all used up."

For a moment he couldn't really think of anything to say to that. It was patently absurd, for a start, but at the same time it was almost familiar. He'd felt that, he'd felt the black feelings creeping in silently so you didn't even notice until you looked around and the world looked like a poorly done black and white movie, the backdrops fake and the acting bad and sitting through until the end seemed like the most excruciating torment of all. He remembered how every movement was a struggle. Every charitable thought was squashed under the weight of a thousand bitter ones, and most of them aimed at yourself. It was like walking through another world, and people might look at you and talk to you but you were wearing a mask and could never quite get there. Oh, he'd been there, and it had brought him to the end of a rope. "I know," he said finally, voice low enough that for a couple of beats of stillness he almost thought she hadn't heard him, until she looked up. "I know how it feels."

"How does it _stop_?" There was something in her voice that said she might have been crying, if she'd been able to, and he wondered what it would be like to be unable to cry. It was a horrible thought. Something they all just took for granted and didn't even think about how important it was, but he'd spent himself so many times that way that he knew too well how sometimes it was the only way to feel a little bit better, just for a while.

Slowly, he slid the barrel of his gun back into the holster. Suzie wasn't going to hurt him. She was more likely to hurt herself, and unlike him, she wouldn't heal. She already had a hole in the back of her head, she didn't need anything else on top of that. 

A startled yelp broke the quiet and he started, banging his spine against the unicorn he was leaning against and wincing before hurriedly reaching up to turn his mic back on.

"I think I've found our monster!" Gwen told them, fear easy to read in her words. "South side of the Millenium Stadium!"

Suddenly, something coalesced in Ianto's mind, pieces clicking together with an easy snap that made him wonder how he hadn't realised it before. It was always the way of it with riddles, they'd nag at you all day until you found out the answer, and then it all seemed so very simple. "Gwen, can you lead it down to the bay?" he asked before anyone else could cut in. He kept his gaze on Suzie, watching her face, watching her to see if she had realised what he was doing, but she was just looking at him in confusion and wariness. It was for her benefit as well as everyone else's that he kept speaking, trying to explain so they wouldn't think he was going completely mad. "Back in 1479, the priest discovered that Death needed thirteen souls to walk the earth for eternity. It was Faith. Not belief, _Faith_. The little girl who was brought back to life, her name was Faith. She stopped it. Suzie can stop it, Suzie's the only one who can stop it."

"How?" Jack demanded. "And why the bay?"

"She's here."

Apparently that was good enough for Jack. "Gwen, do as he says! Everyone else, keep away. We don't want it to try to go for easier prey. Gwen, when you find them, keep going, get somewhere safe."

"We're at the carousel," Ianto added, and clicked the mic back off. He looked at Suzie. "This is how it stops, Suzie. You fight Death, and you beat it. You save everyone."

"I don't know how!" she protested, eyes wide.

He ignored that, leaning down to hold out a hand for her, trying to contain his impatience until she reached up to take it. Her skin was cool and dry in his, but her grip was strong, and he pulled her up until they were face to face and eye to eye. "You said yourself it didn't want anything from you. You don't have anything for it. All we have to do is clear the area so you can fight it. This is what you wanted to do with the glove, you wanted to save people. Now you can do that."

"I'm scared," she whispered, and he nodded. 

"I know."

Then they both turned, facing north as the slap slap slap of shoes on pavement came towards them, Gwen running full pelt with a cloud of black mist in pursuit. Her hair whipped behind her but for the lock that crossed her face, stuck in her mouth, Gwen ignoring it in favour of just running, running.

Ianto squeezed Suzie's shoulder, and moved to jump off the carousel. He waved to Gwen and started to sprint in the direction of the tourist office. She could follow him and they could lock themselves in. As long as Owen and Jack had cleared the area, Suzie would be alone with the thing.

God, he hoped this worked.

*

Gwen wasn't entirely sure how long she'd been lying on the ground for. Ianto had fairly dragged her into the tourist office, slapping the button to open the secret passage (and really, it still amused her, just a bit, that the secret entrance to their secret base was a big black button) so they could get into it. Neither of them wanted to take the risk that a standard door was enough to stop Death. The concept was just too ludicrous. After running for their lives, though, making their way further into the Hub seemed like too much effort, so for now, Ianto was sitting against the wall as she sprawled out on the stone floor. It was probably cleaner than she was, after all, particularly after sweating through her shirt trying to outrun Death.

She wished they had a way to see what was going on from there. The CCTV downstairs seemed so far away, and she felt a little less lazy when she recalled that it actually _was_ , with the main room of the Hub being underneath the water tower at the other end of the Plass. How would they know when it was over? And how would they know if it had worked?

After a time, as the adrenalin wore off and her breathing returned to normal, the discomfit of lying on a stone floor began to get to her, and she carefully levered herself into a sitting position opposite Ianto. He looked... pensive. From experience, she knew that that was a slippery slope - Torchwood was the kind of place where, when something was happening, it was all out and exhilarating and amazing, but when it calmed down again you were in high danger of thinking far too much about things best left alone. "How did you get Suzie to agree?" she asked Ianto, hoping it would draw him out a little. The time would pass better if they were talking, anyway.

He shrugged, expression marginally similar to the one he wore when Jack complimented his work. Modest but pleased, though with a little less of the pleased tonight, it seemed. "She's not evil, just afraid. I only told her that she was the only one who could do it." He looked up, eyes bright in the dimly lit corridor. "She needed a way to save herself."

There was something he was trying to say, Gwen thought, that she wasn't quite understanding. It was frustrating but not entirely unfamiliar, the way Ianto would make obscure jokes with an utterly straight face that she was never entirely sure she got. They might have been the only two Welsh members of the team, but sometimes she felt like they spoke completely different languages. (Actually, that was probably true, since her Welsh extended to about half a dozen words, and with the suits and the name and the accent he was quite possibly the sort of middle class that grew up speaking it.) "Were you friends?"

"Not really. I wasn't friends with any of them, really, back then."

"So this thing with Tosh, that's pretty new?" She was too tired to censor herself or she never would have asked that, and from the expression on his face Ianto was just as surprised as her that she had. Probably he'd thought no one else knew, or at least no one besides the two of them and Jack. She couldn't quite see Jack not knowing, with Ianto staying at the Hub and Jack watching over them all so closely.

"A few weeks, I think. She's been good."

Gwen nodded, smiling as though the conversation were not stilted or awkward. She was glad when a noise outside made them both look towards the panel in the wall and Ianto lunged to his feet, checking the screen that showed the tourist office interior before pushing the lever to open the door. Not that it was likely to be anyone dangerous or unauthorised, but she had to admit, she would have done the same.

It was Suzie, stumbling in through the outside door, looking exhausted and strained. "I did it," she told them, half-collapsing into Ianto's arms, and Gwen's stomach twisted a little as she looked at them. They both looked so normal, it was hard to believe that Suzie was an undead serial killer and Ianto was... what he was. "I did it, I beat it."

Ianto just hugged her, swaying slightly as though he was rocking a child, and when Suzie shifted a little Gwen saw that she was smiling.

*

Epilogue:

Throughout the years Jack had watched any number of autopsies and quite the handful of embalmings. This was the first time that the one being embalmed had still been moving and speaking so shortly before the process. The Hub was actually fairly quiet at the moment, which seemed right somehow - he'd given Gwen the day off after their late night; Toshiko and Ianto too, and Owen with the exception of this task, though Gwen was the only one who'd taken him up on it. It seemed right that they all be there, and evidently they all felt the same way, despite none of them talking about it.

Sleeping in, of course, still took priority, and it was nearly noon when Suzie lay on a sheet-covered gurney in the autopsy bay. She seemed calm, he thought, but after the long talk they'd had it wasn't surprising. They'd gotten a lot of things out, and he was finding now that he didn't actually blame her for what she'd done. It had been the glove, after all. His fault for letting her get so hooked on it. Somehow, though, events had worked themselves to exactly the right end, and even if it was through Suzie's own machinations that the situation had arisen, he thought that what they'd all remember was how it had ended. It was certainly what he was choosing to take with him.

He glanced sideways at Toshiko and Ianto, standing side by side against the railings a couple of feet away, Toshiko leaning against his shoulder and Ianto's arm around her. The sight made him smile a little before he turned back to the scene before them and Owen's careful, professional preparations.

"Right," he said finally, holding up a rather large needle. "Well, Suzie, you still scare the hell out of me, but then you always did. So, uh, anyone got anything else to say?"

Jack shook his head; he and Suzie had already said everything they had to. Beside him, Toshiko ducked her head, hair falling over her face, and Ianto's gaze flicked over both of them before he nodded shortly. "I'm sorry, Suzie. I'll make sure the records are good."

"Thanks." She shifted a little, resettling herself, and nodded to Owen. "Okay, I'm ready. Let's do this."

Though there was no way to sedate her, she closed her eyes, looking (if he ignored the gunshot entry wound under her jaw) as though she were enjoying a relaxing session in a sunbed or a quick nap. She barely moved as Owen found the carotid artery and slid the needle in, or when he put the drainage tube into the jugular vein. She'd redeemed herself, and now it was time to move on.

The entire process would take hours, Jack knew, but he could spare the time. Ianto and Toshiko would probably leave before it was done but it was only right that he remain. He'd brought Suzie into this, and he had to see her out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the ending:
> 
> I'd been trying to figure out the ending for about a month and I suspect several people will raise eyebrows at it. I think I said once when I had barely started in Torchwood fandom that she reminds me of a little girl who's scared of the dark, but who has access to things she can't understand that can hold the darkness off. Possibly I'm wrong and she wouldn't want to die again even if the alternative was being undead and probably locked up, but I think that being the only one who could fight back against Death, and having her old co-workers acknowledge that, and clearing the air with Jack, would at least go some way towards her finding peace.


End file.
